Atlantis #22.1 Urban Society by Jasper Nijveldt

ATLANTIS

MAGAZINE BY POLIS | PLATFORM FOR URBANISM

#22.1 April 2011 Paul Stouten 04 Justina Muliuolyte 08 Wouter Vanstiphout 14 MSc Urbanism TU Delft 22 Hui Xiao-xi 26 The Why Factory 30 Luuk Boelens 34 Ekim Tan 40 Rietveld Landscape 44 MSc Landscape Architecture 48 Gabriele Rendón 50 BVR 55 Henco Bekkering 60

URBAN SOCIETY

Editorial Since urbanism is a practical science, and therefore draws from different disciplines, the challenge for the student urbanist is to construct a meaningful whole out of this input. In order to fulﬁll this, perspectives from different communities have to be judged.

The outline for Atlantis volume 22. If you have ideas and would like to contribute, please do not hesitate to contact us at atlantis@polistudelft.nl

At the TU Delft department of Urbanism these different perspectives are made explicit in eleven chairs. Four chairs are organized around what are considered to be the ‘fundamentals’ of the discipline, which are: Urban Compositions, Landscape Architecture, Spatial Planning & Strategy and Environmental Technology. Alongside these chairs there are some practically orientated or thematic chairs, concerned with the topical aspects of the discipline. They are Urban Design, Regional and Metropolitan Design, Environmental Design, Cultural History and Design, Strategic Planning, The Why Factory and, the latest addition, Design as Politics.

#22.1 Urban Society Keywords: society, regeneration, politics, housing, neighborhood.

These different chairs each provide, apart from the research side of matters, input for the education of students. Because the chairs represent different world views, the challenge for the student is to deduct a narrative out of this. That means ﬁnding relations but also question certain ideas. This ‘synthesizing’ is, to my mind, the most important academic and professional quality one must have. The noun synthesis refers to compiling information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions.

#22.2 Urban Form Keywords: form, density, typologies, design, public space, urban techniques.

The purpose of Atlantis volume 22, published in 4 issues, is contributing to this challenge by exposing different, maybe sometimes opposing perspectives on urbanism. It will be organized by setting up four frames. Within each frame different ideas, methods and techniques will be shown. This is done by means of articles, essays, interviews, designs, photos and models obtained from students, academics and practitioners. Finally, at Atlantis #22.4 a carton bookbinder will be provided to literally tie up all the issues. Hopefully this combination will form a more coherent whole than a mere collection of isolated issues would have done.

ATLANTIS

#22.1 April 2011

MAGAZINE BY POLIS | PLATFORM FOR UBANISM

URBAN SOCIETY

ATLANTIS

#22.1 April 2011

MAGAZINE BY POLIS | PLATFORM FOR UBANISM

URBAN SOCIETY

#22.3 Urban Economy Keywords: globalization, urban economy, competitiveness, branding, foreign direct investment.

ATLANTIS

#22.1 April 2011

MAGAZINE BY POLIS | PLATFORM FOR UBANISM

Every issue will have a similar set-up. Paul Stouten will open this issue of Urban Society by providing a historical framework on the topic of regeneration. Justina Muliuolyte shows her recent graduation work on the regeneration of socialist neighborhoods in Lithuania. Hui Xiao Xi explains the urban renewal in Beijing and its existing challenges and The Why Factory proposes an inspiring alternative to these challenges. Wouter Vanstiphout introduces the new chair of Design as Politics. Luuk Boelens, BVR and Rietveld Landscape present interesting ideas and insights derived from practice, while Ekim Tan and Gabriela Rendon give us an insight into their current academic research. Finally, Henco Bekkering will reﬂect on the topics discussed in this issue. Along these lines, the work of students will be exhibited.

URBAN SOCIETY

#22.4 Urban Landscape Keywords: landscape, metropolitan, urban-rural, biodiversity, border conditions.

ATLANTIS

#22.1 April 2011

MAGAZINE BY POLIS | PLATFORM FOR UBANISM

On behalf of the editorial team, I want to thank all contributors, since it is their work that makes this issue of Atlantis possible! URBAN SOCIETY

Jasper Nijveldt 2

From the board A new Atlantis, a new board and ﬁve wildly enthusiastic new committees! First we have to start with thanking the 2010 board for putting Polis back on track. By organizing a great amount of activities they made Polis visible again and by that they gave the board of 2011 great opportunities to bring Polis again a step further. These ambitions we have summarized in our renewed mission statement: ‘’Our goal is to construct a network for intellectual transmission within the Department of Urbanism and beyond. Connecting students, researchers and practitioners, by exposing and investigating contemporary affairs and academic ideology. We will do this by means of a magazine, organizing excursions, lectures, debates, expositions and other activities’’. The current activities play an important role in this, but we want to strengthen our goal with the use of two pillars.

Committees 2011

The Polis board 2011 would like to dedicate more effort to the monitoring of the quality of education. We aim to do this by organizing for example an evaluation meeting with the students and coordinators after every quarter. Besides that we would like to focus more on the work ﬁeld: connecting students to practitioners working at design ofﬁces & municipalities by means of lectures, workshops and case studies. In doing so, Polis will become more than only the study association for students. Through the mentioned activities and the Atlantis magazine Polis aims to become an interesting medium for academics and professionals.

Small Excursion

Of course Polis is more than that. Polis organizes a combination of valuable and enjoyable activities. Not only excursions, lectures and case studies, but we would also like to organize a Polis Urbanism Week in autumn. Furthermore, we would like to plan small workshops for the bachelor students to get a bit more in touch with urbanism and landscape architecture. For all members we proudly present our new website which is launched this month. On this website we’ll inform you about all kinds of events coming up – inside and outside the TU Delft –, let you browse through the Atlantis Archive, ﬁlter interesting internships and give you the possibility to sign up for Polis activities. Bookmark our new website (www.polistudelft.nl) and keep in touch!

Atlantis Jan Breukelman, Edwin Hans, Jasper Nijveldt & Jan Wilbers

Lectures The lecture committee of Polis will organise lectures throughout the year, and a symposium later this year. The goal is to explore, and get new insights from fields of Urbanism that are not part of the traditional curriculum. The first lecture theme will be Digital Urbanism, consisting of two lectures, of which the first will be about the role of serious gaming in contemporary urban planning. Remmelt Oosterhuis, Sylke Koumans & Thomas Paul

This year's small excursion committee started with a surplus of ideas, and has already had their ﬁrst excursion to Antwerp. Now the team, consisting of ﬁve enthusiastic students is looking for even more exciting places to go, which would ideally match up with the changing themes within the current urbanism stream. Hannah Cremers, Gijs Briet, Andre Kroese, Verena Roell & Wieke Villerius

Big Excursion Polis' Big Excursion committee has been organising excursions since 2008. A group of Urbanism and Architecture enthusiasts strive to combine the educational with the fun, having visited Paris, the city of light, and Hamburg, the city of trade. This year we will go and explore Vienna, the city of Sachertorte! Maike Warmerdam, Alicia Schoo & Liselotte van der A

Borrel The Polis Borrel committee is a newly found group of students which organizes social events for the students of the Master tracks Urbanism and Landscape Architecture. After the stress of a presentation you can count the Borrel committee for some hard earned relaxation and fun times! Keep checking the POLIS website and the Polis Facebook events for more party information! Maaike Zwart, Nazanin Hemmati, Ani Skachokova & Laurens de Lange

Urban greetings from the Polis board 2011, Jorick Beijer, Karien Hofhuis, Vera Konings, Tim Ruijs & Noor Scheltema 3

Changing Contexts in Urban Regeneration paul stouten

The need to combat decay of obsolete housing and services in urban renewal areas has been recognized by every major country in Western Europe, including the Netherlands (Couch et al., 2003). Urban regeneration in general can be considered as developing an approach in a complex urban context that includes a variety of spatial scales, sectors, actors and disciplines. Urban regeneration needs to respond to changing contexts with new economic concentrations in cities that are accompanied by new markets for new population groups within the current urban population (Sassen, 1991). This situation is sometimes in conflict with the living conditions of specific groups in the urban population trapped in economic difficulties, excluded from opportunities and rights. The other side of the same coin and with as the common underlying factor a change in economic structure caused by global competition and technological innovation (Drewe et al. 2008). Urban regeneration needs to respond to new conditions and can therefore not be a static phenomenon. Two basic concerns have become part of the agenda in all new strategies for urban regeneration, namely the search for lasting solutions and an integrated approach to physical, environmental, social and economic programs. Urban renewal was and is an important issue in the Netherlands and particularly renewal of the city of Rotterdam was an interesting example nationally and internationally in the period 1975-1993 (Stouten, 2010). Due to large investments from ﬁnancial and social capital, large parts of old neighborhoods have been modernized. Fundamental changes on the labour and housing market put the housing question of the constructed buildings, environments and living conditions on the agenda again. Since mid 1990s approaches led to a degree of integration of social, economic and building policies. Most of these programs of social renewal, subsequent Big City policies (Grote Stedenbeleid) and neighborhood approaches started in Rotterdam and were later adopted by the central government. Against this background, an evaluation of the results is very worthwhile, particularly because urban renewal policy has to deal with a new context in the last decades, in which privatization and being market driven are the main topics. 4

Urban renewal, urban regeneration and sustainable development The 1970s saw a fundamental change in policy on urban renewal. Besides placing a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and improvement rather than demolition of existing building stock, the approach called for participation of present residents in the renewal process and decentralized control. The approach involved the decentralized direction of the entire process by local authorities and tenant groups working in cooperation. The fact that priority access to new or modernized housing was given to the lower paid made the aims of building-for-the-neighborhood (bouwen voor de buurt) unique in the history of social housing. Building-for-the-neighborhood meant that the then present tenants got priority with regard to the improvement of their housing and living conditions. By the end of the 1980s a market oriented approach and the recognition of new sets of problems and challenges had become dominant in much of Europe. What was new in this approach was the acceptance of the need to take into account environmental objectives related to sustainable development. In the Netherlands urban renewal became more or less part of a more comprehensive form of urban regeneration of a city or region. One of its core activities relates to the functional obsolescence of buildings and the changing requirements of their users. Roberts (2000) summarized the essential features of urban regeneration by deﬁning it as: “comprehensive and integrated vision and action aimed at the resolution of urban problems and seeking to bring about a lasting improvement in the economic, physical, social and environmental condition of an area that has been subjected to change”. The main components put forward as relevant to the regeneration of cities are essentially a strategic activity, including economic regeneration and funding, physical and environmental aspects, social and community issues, employment and education (including training), and housing. In 1987 the report of the Brundtland Committee (WCED, 1987) introduced sustainable development in a worldwide policy guideline. The committee pleaded for sustainable development ‘to ensure that development meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet

their own needs’. The point here is that besides its consequences for the here and now, the way of developing affects the long-term prospects of the earth and its inhabitants. In this tradition sustainable development involves reaching a new balance between rich and poor, today and tomorrow, mankind and nature. For our research into sustainable urban regeneration we have chosen a dynamic concept directed at the integration of physical, economic and social factors (Stouten, 2010). Sustainability will therefore be interpreted here as the quality of a residential situation and human urban environment which is suitable for continued use by its residents and permits improvement in their physical, social and economic conditions including an overall strategic framework for city-wide development.

Urban renewal and urban regeneration in Rotterdam: 1974-1993 In the course of the 1970s, residents in urban renewal areas of Rotterdam, like residents in such areas in other cities, became actively involved in actions pressing for the improvement of their housing situation. The post-war policies with their mass model of housing provision were no longer able to meet the special needs and requirements of tenants in old city areas. Their poor housing conditions were an important reason for the change in policy that took place in 1974. Apart from the poor quality of housing and the residential environment, other important factors included the possibility (or impossibility) of improving the housing situation and reducing social and economic deprivation. A cooperative planning and housing model was developed to manage this improvement. The special attention for the lowest paid meant for example providing affordable new housing for residents of the old areas including brown ﬁeld areas. The purchase of private properties was an important instrument in the urban renewal strategy. It meant that almost 69% of all private properties became social rented properties. The principles underlying the urban renewal strategy were: - ‘Building for the neighborhood’, i.e. working in line with the needs and requirements of the population of the areas subject to urban renewal, thus avoiding forced removal and displacement. - Decentralization and democratization, meaning that decisions about renewal measures should not simply be taken centrally by municipal departments, but should take account of input from and participation by the residents of the area involved. - Socialization of the housing provision, resulting from the city council’s view that private landlords were respon-

sible for much of the deterioration. Because these owners had made no investment or too little investment to maintain their properties, an attempt was made to bring their properties into the social sector by the use of compulsory or voluntary purchase. At the end of the 1980s greater emphasis was put on the status of the urban renewal areas in the city as a whole. Preparation of urban development plans started considering the functioning of the city’s housing market and the relationships with adjacent areas and boroughs. Future production should match the heterogeneity of the population in a better way by increasing the differentiation within the housing stock by more variation in housing typology, housing size, price class and type of ﬁnancing. Developing new types of human environment including residential environments e.g. on the former harbor areas became a great challenge.

Reflections on the ‘building for the neighborhood’ period Nearly 72.000 dwellings (60% of the total housing stock in the old areas) were radically improved by new housing and the modernization of pre-war housing estates. Additionally, 45 primary schools and a large number of new welfare provisions (community centers, medical aid centers and so on) were built in the old areas. Moreover, urban renewal included the realization of 220,000m2 of retail and commercial space. In 1976, 54% of the housing stock was structurally in a poor quality, whereas after urban renewal this proportion fell to no more than 8%. After 1993 poor quality dwellings were mainly concentrated in the housing stock supplied by private landlords. The ﬁndings of urban renewal in other Dutch cities revealed the same poor conditions in the private rental sector (ABF research, 2002). For reﬂections on the ‘building for the neighborhood’ period, a distinction should be made between changes in conditions for urban renewal brought about through external developments and those which could be traced back more or less directly to the urban renewal policy itself, i.e. the building of social housing for the neighborhood population and purchasing housing from private landlords by the local government. External developments are implemented to include the economic recession, long-term unemployment and changes in the structure of employment, the affordability of housing costs, changing ratios of immigrants to natives, social and cultural changes and new relationships between central government, municipalities, housing associations and residential groups. Economic developments in the 1980s – including an economic recession – had a radical effect on urban renewal. 5

Area-based activities declined in the wake of national developments. A number of large industries and service companies moved to the edge of the city or beyond. About 18% of the loss of employment can be ascribed to external developments, i.e. the economic recession, and not to urban renewal itself with its priority on housing. The second point regards the affordability of housing costs, particularly for tenants. Unemployment in the urban renewal areas led to a large proportion of the residents suffering a severe reduction in income. The affordability of urban renewal for tenants on low incomes was threatened. Another point of reﬂection arises if the changes in composition of the population led to changes in the social infrastructure and social networks. New urban lifestyles, not based on the traditional family, clashed with more traditional lifestyles. Many urban renewal areas had formerly occupied a position on the housing market as part of a transitional zone, in which accommodation was partly occupied by recently arrived house-seekers such as students and immigrants. In the meantime a highly heterogeneous area, but nonetheless an area where moving house became less frequent, was coming into being. In these areas ‘residents of old’ and ‘new urbanites’ – several of which practiced new forms of cohabitation, were better educated and lived a more luxurious life – were housed and lived next to one another. With regard to the participation of residents: by and large participation had worked well for native residents of the area, but not so well for immigrants. The new situation, which could be classed as one of stable heterogeneity, required those involved to reshape social relationships.

From the 1990s onwards: Urban regeneration Between 1975 and 1993, urban renewal and social housing had a major effect on urban planning in the Netherlands, particularly in its major cities. In this respect it should be noted that the Netherlands has the highest proportion of social housing in the EU, about 33% of the housing stock, and in the current large Dutch cities this percentage can be as high as 50%. From the mid 1980s onwards the policies of different ministries deﬁned objectives creating a real patchwork of urban policies and problems. Social measures were brought under the ‘problem accumulation areas’ policy. This policy was concerned with social renewal and urban problems. Furthermore it is characterized by an increase of the opportunities available to the long-term unemployed and poorly educated, by improving quality of life and social security and by measures to stimulate the integration of minorities. The beginning of the 1990s saw an increase in socioeconomic problems in the larger cities. Policy however 6

was mainly concerned with privatization. Urban housing policy was characterized by a decrease in the resources made available by government and a greater dependence on private initiatives. The combination of urban renewal and decreased priority for inner-city regeneration led to increased pressure on economic aspects. At the beginning of this millennium the integral approach returned to the scene in the former urban renewal areas through the reintroduction of the area approach, the designation of priority areas and the designation of ‘prize areas’ (prachtwijken) in 2007.

"It is an illusion that with design one can change the urban fabric over 10-15 years." Sustainable urban regeneration requires more than traditional land use plans have to offer. There was a need to improve planning and develop new methods to deal with new problems. Strategic planning was no longer only concerned with so-called flagship projects, but helped to give shape to the renewal. The general strategies were based on the use of specific features of the city, such as the river, the harbors, the canals and so on. These strategies concentrated on the intensification of the existing urban area in combination with high-quality public transport and services. Residential environments were developed for specific lifestyles, taking into account an increase in the flexibility of labour and the consequences of internationalization and migration. All this under the expectation that phenomena as the home as workplace (teleworking), as school (tele-education) and as shop (teleshopping) were still capable of spectacular growth. The content of the area-based strategy was different for the centre than for other urban areas. To increase the vitality and attractiveness of the centre the aim was to increase the number of residents to achieve a ratio of 1:1 between jobs and dwellings. At the time only 28,000 people lived in the Rotterdam’s city centre, while the number of jobs was 80,000. According to central government, a great deal of investment will be necessary in coming years to make cities attractive to middle-income and higher-income groups by increasing the number of owner-occupied properties. This objective – attracting higher-income groups – could to a considerable extent already be found in the policy of the city of Rotterdam.

Till 2008, the central government expected an increase of the demand for the owner-occupied sector. As it was argued in a period of economic growth but also during the current crisis policies are driven on stimulating this tenure at the expense of the social sector. Since mid 1990s the construction of 100.000 dwellings per year were forecasted but this number was never reached. At the same time the waiting lists for tenants looking for new homes were not cleared and prices in the owner-occupied sector increased. Due to new European regulations, in the near future, middle class households will run into trouble in ﬁnding a decent home. They get sandwiched between the social and owner-occupied sector. When they earn more than 33.000 euro a year, they become excluded from the social sector and will have hardly any chance in getting a mortgage. Moreover a lack of training and a low level of education mean that a number of young people entering the housing market as starters will be in no position to buy.

Sustainable Urban Regeneration Last decade there have been a lot of critics on urban regeneration about failing measurement against social deterioration e.g. social safety and criminality. The positive results of urban renewal were mostly ignored while policies contributed to vast improvements of the building stock, services and amenities (see also ABF research, 2002). According to my research (Stouten, 2010) floor plans of newly built housing were highly appreciated by the residents. The appreciation of tenants and professionals of modernization of old housing is sometimes less positive. The current residents rated houses flexible in use of the floor plan and specific dwellings for elderly highly. Solving structural problems, e.g. unemployment and income division, goes beyond the area level. In the period 1975-1993 urban renewal was part of welfare strategies with opportunities for low-income groups and minority ethnic groups to improve their living conditions. Due to urban renewal strategies including a broad societal orientation of housing associations the development of ghettos was avoided. One of the important aims that were reached is to prevent displacement. Residents of the Oude Noorden area did not want to move house from their newly-built or modernized housing (Stouten, 2010). Also, middle class households did want to continue their housing career in this urban renewal area. The quality of the services and facilities is well appreciated but concerning social safety, drugs and crime the balance is still shaky. Despite these negative experiences most of the tenants wanted to stay living in the area and a small majority said that ‘people live together in a pleasant way’ though ‘they hardly know each other’. Urban renewal areas have a het-

erogeneous social fabric. This situation could be threatened due to the development of a more homogeneous vulnerable social fabric. This development is caused by an increase of households becoming dependent on social beneﬁts, decrease of purchasing power and new European regulations on limited access to social housing for only incomes below 33.000 euro per year.

Conclusions The approaches of urban renewal areas ﬂuctuate between inward and outward looking strategies. The ﬁrst is more driven by an area-based strategy while the second is driven by developments beyond this level of scale e.g. changes on the housing and labour market of the city or region. It is important to develop strategies that connect these inward and outward looking approaches as seen complementary. The determining condition for strategic planning in urban renewal areas is the heterogeneous character of the social fabric. This presumes to take account of the strong mix-use of housing, shops, amenities and services that is connected with the multi-cultural characteristics of the population. Strategies based on the so-called social climbers are recommended. That means to take a middle class including different minority ethnic groups seriously in development of planning strategies. It is an illusion that with design one can change the urban fabric over 10-15 years. The population and her requirements will change. Flexibility in use of the urban fabric is an instrument to adapt to eventual new requirements.

References ABF research (2002); Stadsvernieuwing gemeten: Basisanalyse KWR 2000. Delft: ABF research. Couch, C., C. Fraser and S. Percy (2003); Urban Regeneration in Europe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Drewe, P., J. Klein and E. Hulsbergen (eds.) (2008); The Challenge of Social Innovation in Urban Revitalization. Amsterdam: Techne Press. Roberts, P. (2000); The Evolution, Deﬁnition and Purpose of Urban Regeneration. In: Roberts, P and H. Sykes (eds.): Urban Regeneration: A handbook. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 9-37. Sassen, S. (1991); The Global City; New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton and New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Stouten, P. (2010); Changing Contexts in Urban Regeneration; 30 years of modernisation in Rotterdam. Amsterdam: Techne Press. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) (1987); Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press.

City, catch the time! Rediscovering socialist neighborhoods in a new capitalist society. Study case - Vilnius, Lithuania

justina muliuolyte

The graduation project “City, catch the time! Rediscovering socialist neighborhoods in a new capitalist society” focuses on the regeneration of large scale housing estates in post socialist cities. The case study is Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. The combined research, planning and design project which was carried out in the graduation year intends to offer alternatives on how to develop housing estates in post-socialist micro districts by overtaking coming threats and satisfying current city needs. Since the restructuring of socialist neighbourhoods is an important topic in all post socialist cities, the proposed strategy and design could become a pilot project for other similar sized cities in Lithuania, in the Baltic States, or even in all of Eastern Europe. In 1970s western European cities have recognised the problems of modernist housing and started regeneration strategies. Contrary to this, the former USSR continued the construction of modernist blocks up until the 1990s and on a much larger scale. Currently huge housing estates in the peripheries of post socialist cities show their ﬁrst signs of decline. If revitalisation strategies are not started soon, most cities in the entire Eastern Europe will face serious urban problems. After the analysis of Vilnius, it was found that the city has more problems than the housing estates alone. There is a big threat of urban sprawl and environmentally unsustainable developments. Currently, housing estates are popular among citizens for their public transportation, green spaces and room for development and changes. All in all, Vilnius needs to search for a more sustainable vision of future development. The graduation project focuses on two scales: city and neighbourhood. The advantages of socialist housing will contribute to the new structure of the city, while the new city structure will be the way to revitalise neighbourhoods. The project can be explained in three main parts: vision for the city (1), regeneration strategy for the housing estates (2), and design of the public space system in the new centrality (3).

Vision for the city “Polycentric city with network of centralities” Vilnius has the characteristics of a compact European city, as well as features of a modern socialist city. Its development can be deﬁned in three main phases (image 1). In the beginning Vilnius was a compact European city with a busy old

Figure 1. Vilnius development and vision

Figure 2. Qualities of the site Justina Muliuolyte (www.justinamuliuolyte.eu) Graduated June 2010, Urbanism, Complex Cities studio. Mentors: Roberto Rocco, John Westrik, Qu Lei

town, diverse functions, houses and neighbourhoods. During the rule of the socialist regime, Vilnius was developed as a modern city, with the separation of functions and the development of huge housing estates in the peripheries of the city centre. Currently the city is sprawling and losing its boundaries, whereas all the functions are concentrated in the centre and housing estates are declining. What could be the future structure of Vilnius? The graduation project suggests a development of the city utilising the qualities of all the past phases: to learn from the old town structure and apply these features to the modernist nucleus. Consequently the city should be developed into a compact city with a network of centralities connected by better public transport links. The sub centres could be those same modernist estates but enhanced with extra functions, diversity and connections. The area selected for the proposal is a huge socialist housing estate in the north of the city, which is supposed to become one of the new centres.

Regeneration strategy “From the periphery into the centrality” Currently the estate has 150.000 residents and covers an area comparable in size to Delft. It has only one dominating function which is residential, just one type of housing, and the same open modern space everywhere. The goal of the strategy for the housing estate is to change the monotonous periphery into a diverse and compact centrality. The revitalisation strategy was designed according to local site qualities (image 2), TOD principles and general planning rules on how to change a

Figure 4-00. Design route and program

4-01. Design urban centre

4-02. Create urban street and add program

4-03. Deﬁne closed and calm courtyards

Figure 4-04 Add new housing typology

modern city into a compact one while keeping its existing qualities – not through demolition, but by addition. The strategy promotes the development of a mixed use district centre according to transit oriented development (TOD) principles: where the highest density is in the most accessible point, decreasing to the edges of the neighbourhood. The centre will be in the triangle where three main roads are crossing, the tram is passing and a transport interchange hub is planned. The road structure of the centrality is changed from a branching modern “tree” into a network, by adding extra links and connections. A continuous urban area is created to replace the existing fragmented neighbourhoods. The new centrality will contain a diverse set of functions, housing typologies, densities and open spaces. This new system of public space would connect the socialist neighbourhoods with the new sub centre, surrounding landscapes and other neighbourhoods. In the design phase one of the routes linking the housing areas with the centre was elaborated.

Design of the route from the housing estate to the centre The project presented here is a route that covers all intervention areas: the transformation of the centre, the revitalisation of housing estates and park design. The route as a connection to the centre is a tool to revitalise neighbourhoods by changing their public space system and adding functions to the nodes. The goal of this project is to create a mixed use environment in a vital urban artery. Currently the open space on the route has two main characters: in the housing areas it is very empty and unmaintained, whereas in the planned centre it is unfriendly to pedestrians, dominated by roads and car parks. Before designing the route observations were made about common open space problems and based on these observations principles were suggested on how to make public space more attractive. Public space problems with their suggestions for improvement are collected into a design toolbox (image 3). The route project (image 4-00) is split into a few phases. Firstly the mixed use district centre is designed (image 4-01), with a high density, a multitude of functions, urban streets and squares. Subsequently the centre is linked with the neighbourhoods and parks by a main street - forming the route (image 4-02). The proposal provides missing connections and added functions along the nodes, while some functions are replaced entirely. Finally, a distinction will be made between private and public spaces. Modern blocks will be closed by creating private courtyards (image 4-03). The empty plots are developed into a new type of housing (image 4-04). All of these interventions were made using the design toolbox. The approach of the

Figure 3. Design toolbox

project is to have less open space but of higher quality and to create spaces for new low rise housing. The result of these interventions is a combination of lively, integrated housing areas, centralisation, and a polycentric city.

Evaluation All in all the revitalisation strategy demonstrates a new, creative and feasible approach on how to transform dull socialist estates into lively and attractive sub centres. The modernist city is changed, but by keeping its existing qualities, diversity in housing is created, functions are added, a higher density is generated and the public space becomes dedicated to pedestrians instead of cars. The fragmented periphery becomes an integrated centrality. The effect of this strategy could have an inﬂuence on the city as a whole, since it focuses on compact developments, on low rise housing within the city and not in suburbia. The proposal opens opportunities for real estate in the modernist housing areas through its emphasis on public transport and mix of uses. The approach is realistically applicable and can contribute to new town development and regeneration at the same time. 11

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This d datavisual shows the th most used sed keywords from master theses, these books, dissertations and articles which are digitally published in the repository by the repos he Urbani Urbanism department ent of the TU Delft. A total of 206 entries es of the last five years are used.

Design as Politics Interview with Wouter Vanstiphout In this recurring segment, we zoom in on one of the chairs within the department of Urbanism in Delft, to get a more detailed overview of the background, the current status, and the future plans of the chairs, with particular focus on the views on education and current events. For this edition we approached the relatively new chair of Design as Politics, led by Prof. Dr. Wouter Vanstiphout. In this interview he explains the role of the chair within the Faculty of Architecture, and within the current political climate. Furthermore he gives his views on education, the chairs’ work for the IABR (International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam) and a must read list of books that are related to his work approach.

About the chair Initiated by the ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieu) of the Netherlands and housed within the faculty of architecture at the Delft University of Technology, the chair of Design as Politics will be exploring, researching and defining the boundaries, commonalities and tensions between the fields of politics and design. The chair understands politics in the widest sense possible: it defines it as that level in society on which conflicting interests of groups of people become visible and are being solved, oftentimes through debate and negotiation, but possibly by exerting power or using physical violence. The political consequently implies succeeding

Drawing by Yu Zhang, In the Ghetto studio

in formulating a description of society in which certain interests are consciously given higher values than others, and the skilled use of a toolset to physically enforce this descriptive approach. The chair of Design & Politics does not consider design and politics to be two separated worlds, but rather considers politics to be an important dimension of design and, simultaneously, design an equally important tool for political action. An alternative name for the chair could thus be ‘Design as Politics’. This means that the toolset of the designer will be renewed by looking at the realm of politics, while the spatial perspective of developments in society will be considered to enrich the existing set of political instruments. The chair is explicitly looking for alternatives for classical top-down planning methods and control mechanisms, through which governments have manifested themselves in the 20th century.1

Background of the Chair ‘There is a longer running project called Design and Politics which is run by the Department of Planning at what used to be the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment. This project resulted in a number of books, four by now, and in the creation of a chair at the Technical University of Delft. The idea behind the whole program and the chair is to bridge the gap between planning, architecture and politics. This means that designers should know more about

politics and should involve the political process and agendas more into their work. The other way around, which was maybe more specifically aimed at, there could be a revival within the political world of the interest in planning and architecture as real tools to get what they want. When I started with the chair, one of the very first things that we did was to change the title from Design and Politics into Design as Politics, because I wanted to avoid the idea that you would see design and politics as two separate entities. What I found much more important to stress is the fact that design beyond a certain scale, beyond the interior, is always political by definition. The other way around politics has nearly always had a spatial dimension to it. This is because it’s about a lot of things happening at the same time in a limited space, forcing people to make choices. If everything would happen with no spatial or temporal relation to each other no one would have to make choices. But it is because of the fact that things influence each other that you have to.

Wouter Vanstiphout graduated in 1991 in Art and Architectural History and Archaeology at the University of Groningen. He is currently a member of the research collective Crimson Architectural Historians, which he founded in 1994 together with Michelle Provoost. Crimson Architectural Historians carries out historical research, creates culturalhistorical value assessments and develops visions on the organisation of exhibitions. The collective also focuses on issues relating to regional development and delivers keen observations and interpretations of current design and planning issues. Van-

Therefore politics is always spatial and planning and architecture is always political, because you’re always spending other people’s money and you’re always doing something that has an effect on people that you do not know. If you make that effect happen you better have a good explanation for it, so it has to be legitimate in some way. You can either enforce that legitimacy or there is a real legitimacy, but it’s always an issue. For me these things are more fundamental than the instrumental deﬁnition, which is that architects need politicians, and politicians can use architects. But without those instrumental aspects the chair would have never been launched.’

stiphout also give lectures and fulﬁls guest lectureships at various educational institutes at home and abroad, and is Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Technische Universität Berlin. For the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Vienna, he developed the new history and theory of architecture curriculum, which focuses on the social embedding of architecture and urban development. As

Current and future projects

Professor of Politics and Design, he will

‘The ﬁrst year we were up and running mostly based on a autonomous deﬁnition of the chair, we needed that to create our own identity that students could hook up to, or stay far away from. This is why we did the In the Ghetto graduation studio and the Blame the Architect lecture series on the relationship between riots and planning. These courses do not have a direct instrumental relationship with any of the agendas of the ministry, for instance segregation or problem areas. Of course these things are hugely important to the ministry and to local politicians, but this was a very autonomous content-based way to deal with it. This year the Biennale has become our main focus, in which we deal with

again focus on this social embedding of architecture and urban development, but with the emphasis on the political-administrational aspect. (bk.tudelft.nl) 1) designaspolitics.wordpress.com/about/

things in a very instrumental way. Apart from the collaboration with the Biennale organisation, partly run by the ministry, we are also working directly with people from the ministry on projects that are instrumentally important to them. These are for instance the new infrastructure through the green heart, planning the edges of the green heart, dealing with vacancy in ofﬁce buildings in central cities, the role of ﬁnance, etc. This year we hope to be useful in the most direct possible way.’ One of these instrumental projects the chair will be working on is a study for the A3 highway through the Green Heart. ‘The highway is a direct result of the new government, and the only reason it’s on the agenda is because of the PVV, the freedom party. What we found interesting is that a highway which has been out of the question since the late 60’s, early 70’s is now on the agenda again. It’s a combination of ‘everything for highways, and everything for cars’, a populist right wing obsession. The other thing is resentment against environmental protection, against an open green heart as some sort of fetish of environmental protectionism. So the party wants a highway through it in a straight line from Amsterdam to Rotterdam. We will start a graduation studio on it coming September.’

Rotterdam Biennale 2012 The chair is also working on the TU Delft contribution of next year’s Biennale in Rotterdam. Themed Making City, it explores the relation between planning, design, and politics. ‘The whole point of the Biennale is to study similar projects in entirely different contexts, in order to learn about them, and to expand the range of possibilities that we can see for these projects. One example, we are going to study a new highway around Sao Paulo and a new highway through the green heart. We will study them in parallel and propose solutions in parallel. Sao Paulo was given as one of the locations for the Biennale, we created the equivalent in the Netherlands and as a saviour Geert Wilders came and proposed this new A3 highway. The interesting idea is that whereas in Sao Paulo you would say everything is different than in the Netherlands, it is often the conservative liberal right wing agenda or institution that push large scale infrastructure to deal with the city. The left wing progressive institutions push for more planning, more environmental protection, and more social housing. You see the same role and the same interaction, or no interaction between infrastructure, planning and designing in a place like Brazil as in the Netherlands. The problem is that with a more progressive deﬁnition of planning, highways always land on the ground as UFO’s. Nobody has anything to do with their design except engineers, and then it is up to planners and landscape architects to mitigate. This is also happening in Sao Paulo. If a highway like this is coming anyway let’s, instead of being passively against it, completely embrace it and see what happens if we would be able to design it. Can we design a highway that is the biggest, most brutal insult to decades of Dutch planning and nearly a direct molestation of the green heart, and is there a way to deal with it? One of the things I am interested in is this head-on confrontation with something that comes from another part of the spectrum. Another thing of course, is that politics is the art of the compromise, not just 16

“One of the things I am interested in is this head-on confrontation with something that comes from another part of the spectrum.” in the Netherlands but everywhere. Bismarck once said that politics is like sausage; you do not want to know how it is made. It is always a dirty compromising business in which two parties try to keep hold of their side of the ideology for as long as possible. So in that sense the design studio should not just be about designing exactly the thing that you want, in the sense of purifying everything that is bad. Rather, it should be about a confrontation. Of course there are loads of architects in Delft who love highways, so, that will be the big problem.’ With the new government in place, the ministry of infrastructure and the ministry of spatial planning have been merged into one. ‘In that sense it is a very instrumental studio, it’s a direct translation of the new challenges for this ministry into a graduation studio. The infrastructure people and planning people didn’t even speak to each other for the last 40 years, they didn’t know each other. And now they are forced into one building, literally, to do projects together. Now they have also been forced to study this highway proposal, and they don’t know what to do with it. So everyone is pushing it around, and in the end we said: we will study it.’

Changing planning culture With the formation of the new government, the planning culture has also changed, with most projects no longer being on a national level, but on a provincial and municipal level, which will have an effect on planning culture in the Netherlands. ‘There are different ways of speculating about this. The realistic, slightly fatalistic view about it is that nothing will change, because this is the Netherlands, where nothing ever changes. There will be ways in which the system and its institutions absorb any change that is forged on them from above into a kind of stasis. But let’s not go on that road. Another way of speculating is that it will create a situation of action is reaction. The government has said there are certain things that will be planned and executed nationally. They will plan things like infrastructure, power plants or airports, and locally, provinces and municipalities will have to mitigate that and embed it into the area. Within these provinces and municipalities there is less and less money and professionalism, and less money for professionalism, so they are getting an extra task, but they are not getting the extra means. This will create a situation in which officially these provinces have to embed, mitigate, absorb, and plan whatever comes at them. The Ministry now says they do not want to do all that planning and all those details, but I think in the end it will come back like a boomerang. It will mean, I hope that once they start laying out highways they will have to take in account all these contextual things, and they will have to start designing anyway. At least then they will not be designing on the abstract planning scale that they have been used to for the last fifty years, because they will have to design much more in context. So I think design will make its comeback within national institutions in a certain way. I’m not even so negative about what is happening right now on that level, because I think that the whole tradition of spatial planning in the Netherlands, with huge bills for spatial planning for the entire country, and a very abstract, extremely bureaucratic, map based way of planning, was already completely bankrupt for fifteen years anyway. Therefore this more realistic action is reaction 17

based practice has a lot of potential. One other thing to speculate on is a more extreme scenario. If you think through the idea of letting provinces make their own planning policies on a more fundamental level, in which it would be regionalised on a deep legal level, then it would be interesting. It would be more like America, where the planning is up to the states and one state has no planning at all, nothing, and another state plans everything. In places like the Randstad, because of their tradition, their density, their history and their culture, planning is still very dominant. Everybody accepts that their neighbour cannot just do anything he wants in his backyard because planning has a big acceptance here. In places like Brabant there is a more Belgian culture of do-it-yourself, it is much more autonomous and anti-planning. There is more illegal stuff going on, and much more informality. So you could even speculate on every region of the Netherlands having a completely, really utterly different idea of planning. I ﬁnd that interesting because on the European scale, you notice that these things are much more regionally and culturally bound, rather than by nationality or within national borders. It would mean that some regions make a structural plan while others make a real master plan, and a third group does nothing at all. That is something that could be interesting.’

Education and politics Politics does not play a big role in education at the Faculty of Architecture at the TU Delft, but perhaps it should become a more integral part of education. ‘I think there are three dominant schools in Delft. There’s one that is all about a quality, professionalism, craftsmanship, and it is mostly apolitical. Then there’s the school of for instance the Why Factory, which is about architects and politics being wound up, or joining on a kind of visionary ray. It’s about building the future and visionary thinking, so it is political, but also apolitical, because it doesn’t talk about it exactly. In that visionary sense of architecture, politics plays an important role because politics is power, and you need power to make this architecture. Then there is the third school, which is the activists’ school. It’s wound up with this anti-globalist, left wing, bottom up, outside of the system alternative or independent position. All of them more or less avoid the issue and go around politics, and I think that is the niche where our chair comes into, because we try to deal with politics in a political way. We do not try to keep our hands clean by just staying in an activist enclave. We are not obsessed with power as a tool to make visions because I am really not interested in visions, and of course as a historian I cannot 18

even deal with the whole idea of architecture being about professionalism, because then I would have no place in teaching it at the school in the first place. One of the ways to deal with politics right now is to make young architects and planners understand that the business that they are in is deeply political. It is not just internally political, like the politics of getting a job, or getting a commission, but it is undistinguishable from politics in general, it is politics in its most concrete form. I am not from the school that says you can have right wing architecture or left wing architecture as a result, but I think architecture is political during the whole process. Where do you get the money? Where do you get your legitimacy? Which parts of the program do you implicitly or explicitly see as more important than other parts of the program? In that sense, for each building that is bigger than the interior, these questions are being answered every day, even if they are never being posed. That is, I think the school of thought about the relationship between architecture and politics that I would somehow like to describe and get across. Something that I find increasingly interesting in Delft is the fact that more than 50 per cent of the master students in Delft are, as the Dutch would say niet westerse allochtoon, meaning they come from outside of Europe. Delft is always worrying about having an international reputation, but I think that it should be turned around. The internationalism within Delft is something that should be used in a much more concrete and direct, and more expressive way than it is now. Having come from teaching in Vienna and Berlin, especially Vienna is the most terrifying provincial city in the world. The most exotic people you could find there are Czechs, who live 60 km away. In Delft it’s the other way round and it creates an enormous opportunity to study other situations and other cities in depth, and to do that in a kind of no-budget or low-budget way. We can do amazing things by using the master student body in a much more pragmatic and professional way, by having them work much more with the knowledge and the networks of the students themselves, which I think you can expect from a student in the master phase. Our instrumental studies for the Randstad are now embedded in a very wide research in which we study cities all over the world and we try to understand them on an equal basis. In all these cities we try to understand the relationship between the political situation, economics, the size of the city, the fairness of the city, the way the city is built, the way it is designed, planned, by whom the choices are being made, and we try to understand cities as political entities. There are cities that are extremely politi-

cal, that are on the political headlines too; cities like Teheran, Cairo or American cities like Detroit. In a ridiculously easy way we are able to ﬁnd people who are from there, and are doing their PhD on those cities, have lived there forever and know everybody there. This is something I am trying to mobilize, much more strongly now.

Selected readings 'A book that I really like is Seeing like a State by James Scott. It’s a book by a social scientist who writes about how big plans that were made with the best intentions to reform entire countries have resulted in

Views on regeneration

terrible failures. Its’ an interesting book,

‘The funny thing with regeneration is that it assumes the death, or at least the near death of an area, and that is rarely the case. So one of the first questions you could ask is: what are motives behind it? The motives are of course intimately connected to the parties involved. It’s often very predictable which motives a party has. For example, when we (Crimson Architectural Historians) worked in Hoogvliet, we actually came in because of a huge regeneration project that was being started by three parties; two housing corporations and the local municipality. They had a very simple motive, which was to destroy two fifths of the housing stock, thereby creating a new housing stock that would bring in more money and that would exclude the most difficult inhabitants, either because they were too poor, too criminal, or too ethnic. We rode in piggyback on that agenda, and then once we were in we jumped off, and we created our own regeneration agenda. Their agenda was in a way generic, it said there is some sort of spread sheet of quantitative criteria to check the housing area on, and when it didn’t respond, it didn’t comply. So they started changing the housing area until it did comply with the spread sheet. That is, you could say the modernist way of doing regeneration. We tried to do it the other way around, and I hesitate to use the term bottom up, because we were both top down and bottom up. We tried to do it from an understanding of this specific place, but then as a whole, instead of the most institutionalised way of looking at a very limited number of elements or criteria; like the size of the housing, the price of the housing, or the ethnic makeup. This is very housing based approach, which is logical because these days the entire initiative for regeneration lies in the hands of the housing corporations, and no longer in the hands of the planners, or the city. The city planners would by definition have a more integral view.

not that you have to completely agree with the author, but to see how the outside world looks at the visionary planning that architects love so much.

Another book that I found a breathless experience to read is Bombay Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. He’s an Indian journalist from Mumbai, and he writes about daily life in the city. It’s an incredibly busy book, like the city, in which he describes for instance the way in which the Indian maﬁa or the Bollywood industry

These corporations look at a very limited number of elements, but they look at these elements in a universal way. In a way you could say they are more limited and smaller than what we do. We look at the entire community, everything, and not just everything now, but also everything in the past and everything in the future. So in a way we are much more megalomaniac and more modernist than these corporations. We try to wring a narrative out of that, and use that narrative as the legitimisation of the interventions that we propose. It’s like the whole modernist project has split in two directions, in which we would look at everything, but then just for one place, and they would look at a small selection, but then for all cities. I think our way is the best way, to look at the whole thing as one unique thing.’ (JW)

works. Basically he writes about the life in the city, the climate, and the impossible density in this city. In a sense it is comparable to the TV-series the Wire, because it peals open a part of the city as an interlocking system; school system, drugs system, the port system, the police system, etc., but it does this from an extremely subjective and personal point of view. Lastly, my personal biggest hero as an architectural historian is Reyner Banhman. A personal favourite is his book on Los Angeles; Los Angeles; The Architecture of Four Ecologies, a book from 1971.’

Blame the Architect Riots in Riga

Viktorija Prilenska

the Architect lecture series given by Wout-

“Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation.”

er Vanstiphout at the Faculty of Architec-

Christopher Caldwell, New York Times, November 25, 2005

This project is a follow up on the Blame

ture, TU Delft on the relation between large scale housing projects and riots. This study explores the possibilities for riots to occur in other, imaginative situations, in this case the city of Riga. This visual essay by Viktorija Prilenska, gives the background to these riots, the actual riots, and the results of the riots from different angles, including different forms of media. The full poster presentation can be found at polistudelft.nl/atlantis/archive/

'However, the described riot is a ﬁction and cannot be used as a case study. In my opinion, urban conditions have little inﬂuence on urban violence, it is the modern society, the gaming, movie and music industry that celebrate violence and encourage youth to commit crimes.'

'As a hot spot for Blame the Architect research by design I have chosen the city of Riga (Latvia). In this view, Riga does not have components for an 'urban' riot, since there are no compact areas where people of certain ethnicity or income live. Besides that protests and strikes are usually well-organized and go off with no incidents. The only time when a peaceful demonstration resulted into an outbreak of violence followed by looting and hooliganism happened on 13 January 2009 during the hardest phase of the financial crisis. Back then the police troops suppressed the riot in several hours, property damage was negligible and there were no casualties. However, if there had been a strong political party or trade union behind the riot, the march might have had severe consequences. As, for instance, in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union when the people erected barricades all over the old town and blocked major governmental and media centers protecting the legal government from the militaries. (figure 1) In my doom scenario for the city of Riga the riot begins as a protest against the state policy. Demonstrators demand from the president that he dissolve the parliament and sets a date for the new elections and introduces a fair and transparent governance (figure 2). However, the dominant coalition does not react to these demands and the people lay a siege to the building of parliament. Further on the events develop rapidly, the city core with all the governmental institutions, the entrances to the city and the bridges are blocked by improvised barricades and heavy machinery (figure 3). The president and the ministers introduce the state of emergency and give an order to the army to put down the uprising. (figure 4, 5, 6) During the clashes between the military and the rebels the first casualties occur and the army splits up. Anarchy spreads all around the country, mass disorders are stopped by foreign peacekeepers who intervene in the country. A new president and parliament are erected. Latvia turns from the parliamentary republic into a presidential. TV and radio provide a full live coverage of the riot. There are mass discussions on internet forums, blogs and social networks. (figure 7, 8) Although media does not give any appraisal of the events or involved parties, the rioters are supported by the people and thus depicted as national heroes. Afterwards some independent journalists reveal some unwanted truths about the riots, but the information does not spread out into masses. The new coalition launches big infrastructure projects, such as bridges and roads, in order to prevent the city from being blocked in case of a new riot. The governmental buildings are secretly connected via a network of underground escape tunnels. Despite of an economic recession architects, urban planners and developers receive big governmental commissions.'

Figure 1. Blocking goverment centers in Riga, 1991

Figure 2. Demonstrators hit the streets

Figure 3. Improvised Barricades blocking goverment buildings

Figure 4. Results of the riots

Figure 5. Results of the riots

Figure 6. Results of the riots

Figure 7. Online video coverage of the riots

Figure 8. TV News coverage on the riots

MSc 1 Urbanism Q1 - Analysis and Design of City Fall 2010

Figure 1. Plan drawing of the new city center

Zwolle in the Wetlands A. Skachokova, R. van Dijk, W.Villerius 'Although Zwolle is located in a delta this is not tangible in the city. Our masterplan consists of four interconnected projects aiming to reconnect Zwolle with its waterscapes. A new promenade will connect the center with the canals and its surrounding areas. A new residential area integrating water storage and housing and the reopening of the Willemsvaart will make new connections between Zwolle and its surrounding rivers. To deal with future water level rise we proposed a `bypass` combined with a city extension. We used the designs made for the existing city as a toolbox (Figure 2).'

Detail - City Ring

Figure 2. Masterplan for Zwolle

R. van Dijk 'The borders surrounding the city center will be designed as a promenade. The promenade deﬁnes the character of the connection between the city center and the area surrounding the city center. It also connects the surrounding areas with each other. The northern part of the promenade will be deﬁned as a quay area, the southern part as a singel area. New program will function as a ‘stepping stone’ to the surrounding areas. The north mixed-use area will be a wharf area, connected to the quay typology. The new residential area in the south east will be an avenue area, connected to the singel typology (Figure 1, 3).'

Figure 3. Plans for the city center

Figure 4. Public spaces behind residential buildings

Apeldoorn Day Trip City E. Machedon, J. Berg, T. Galesloot, A. Stobbe 'Apeldoorn is a Dutch mid-size city located on the eastern borders of the Veluwe. The city faces the danger of shrinking partly because of its young inhabitants’ emigration. Our main aim is to ensure the population continuity, on a regional scale by better positioning Apeldoorn in its city network and on a city scale by improvingt housing supplies and amenities for young people. We deﬁned the city’s proﬁle as a Day Trip City thanks to its existing recreational features which should be further on strengthened and better connected in order to increase the city’s attractiveness (Figure 5). The detailed projects focus on a new city window along the rail tracks, a new residential area for starters and two public space interventions.'

Detail - Backgarden Figure 5. Masterplan for Apeldoorn

Figure 6. View on the public spaces from the street.

E. Machedon 'The main goal for Apeldoorn’s city centre is structuring a higher quality public space. This will not only serve the city’s day trip visitors which have little time to explore along their way but also the city’s inhabitants which need a wider set of activities for spending their free time. The distinct quality of this detail project is its use of public spaces situated behind collective residential buildings, now used under their potential as parking lots (Figure 4, 6). The projects ambition is to integrate these spaces in the city’s public space network by using soft urban design interventions. This green pedestrian path will connect the train station to the city hall plaza.'

MSc 1 Urbanism Q2 - Socio-spatial processes in urban societies Boulevard as a window Liang Wei 'Nijmegen is facing a challenge. A plan has been made to connect the two parts of the city segregated by De Waal River by means of a city ring with an extra bridge. This provides opportunity for the development of Citadel and Lent. This new city ring will integrate the urban context and become an interesting route with a diversity of urban activities (Figure 1). The River Park with the boulevard is a strategic spot within this city ring (Figure 2). Instead of being an edge of the city, the River Park will become an important place where people meet as a recreation area inside of the city. Eventually, River Park will be incorporated in the mental map of Nijmegen citizens and becomes a booming place. The boulevard is the centre of the River Park is facing Nijmegen’s historical window, namely the waterfront of the old city centre. The goal of this project is triggering development at the boulevard in order it be the best spot where people could see the beautiful panorama of old centre of Nijmegen and the Waal (Figure 5, 6). Meanwhile, the opposite view to this Boulevard could be attractive as well. A variety of space, interesting program, and collective activities represent spatial, social quality of this place to become a new window for Nijmegen. Therefore two strategies are applied. The ﬁrst strategy is adding new programs of recreation and events. This could be the Wandelvierdaagse as an international event to catalyze activities on the boulevard. The second strategy is making the area well accessible. At present most city activity happens in the old centre of Nijmegen. When the Citadel plan is executed there will be a lot of social movement between the old centre and the new Citadel centre. In this way, the Boulevard could be a hub for the ﬂow between the two centres and one of to the island as well. (Figure 3, 4). In the end the Boulevard will become a destination from both sides of Nijmegen’s river.'

Figure 3. Section towards the water front

Figure 1. Diversity along the ring road

Figure 2. Orientation of the River Park

Figure 4. Model of the River Park developements

Figure 5. View on the new boulevard along the water front

See more projects? Go to http://polistudelft.nl/ atlantis/archive/

Figure 6. View towards the bridge and old centre of Nijmegen

Urban Renewal in Beijing: Its Transition and Existing Challenge Hui Xiao-xi, Sebastian

As with many other cities, urban renewal is a critical question in the urban development of Beijing. The idea of large-scale urban reconstruction can be traced back to the dream of modernization in the 1950s, but the pro-growth engine within market-oriented economic reform has also accelerated its realization. While urban reconstruction has significantly changed the cityscape and promoted urban development, it has also resulted in the destruction of the city’s historical urban morphology and led to an increase in social conflicts. Since 2004, many urban renewal projects have started to come to a standstill. Although some new strategies of urban renewal were developed in recent years, the urban renewal of Beijing is facing a dilemma. In this short essay, I would like to briefly review the transition of urban renewal in Beijing and reveal the challenges it faces at present.

Ir. MSc. HUI Xiao-xi, Sebastian

The history of urban renewal in Beijing

1) Under the planned socialistic system,

In Beijing, urban renewal was first proposed under the ambition to fundamentally reconstruct the old city in the 1950s. But under the planned economic system, in which either urban development or housing construction is highly dependent on public investment, large-scale urban renewal was never really implemented due to a lack of funding. From the 1950s to the 1980s, urban renewal only consisted of a few reconstruction projects for the development of public buildings or infrastructure, with housing renewal considered a non-priority for the government. Until the middle of the 1980s, many of the older housing areas had deteriorated considerably, and thus urban renewal became a key issue in the plan of urban development. After the success of several pilot projects in the late 1980s, the municipal government decided to launch the large-scale urban renewal of “decrepit and old” housing areas at the beginning of the 1990s. Many historical Hutong areas in the old city, as well as the earlier developed socialistic public housing areas¹, were earmarked for demolition and reconstruction (see figure 1). In the transition from the planned economy to the market economy it has been proposed to combine large-scale urban reconstruction with real estate development in order to solve the funding problem of urban renewal. Several years later, the radical housing reform in 1998 fundamentally changed the urban housing provision system and the approach of urban renewal. After 1998, the era of socialistic public housing finally ended, with the majority of public housing becoming privatized, and the task of solving the housing problem in the city was commissioned to the market. In Beijing, the policy of “Urban Renewal by Housing Reform”, which intends to promote urban reconstruction through housing privatization and “monetized” rehousing², further boosted the market-oriented urban reconstruction. However, the urban reconstruction combined with forprofit real estate investment caused an inevitable series of new urban problems: many historical neighborhoods were demolished completely and with this came

the housing provision was thought a basic

Director, Beijing Institute of Sustainable Housing and Urban Renewal (BiSHUR), Beijing University of Technology

welfare for Chinese urban residents and the responsibility of the government. The socialistic public housing was largely developed in Beijing and other Chinese cities. But till the 1990s, many public housing areas that were developed in the 1950s immediately after the People’s Republic was founded also started to be aged and outdated.

Figure 1) The presently most popular approach of urban renewal in Beijing: Wholesale demolition and reconstruction

the displacement of local residents, as many could not afford the newly constructed dwellings. Along with the increasingly potent argument for private property, the constitutional amendment in 2004 and the promulgation of Property Law in 2007 legally confirmed the protection of private property for the first time in the history of the People’s Republic. As a result of the legalization of private property, housing speculation and the conflict between different actors and social groups increased. During the same period, historical conservation was emphasized for the first time. After 2004, disagreements with residents and difficulties in balancing investments led to the suspension of a large number of urban renewal projects.

2) According to the policy of “Urban Renewal by Housing Reform”, the public housing tenants in the urban renewal areas are asked to buy the subsidized resettlement dwellings. The rehousing in the urban reconstruction is deﬁned as a “marketized” and “monetized” process. The original tenants are impelled to become the homeowners.

The latest attempts With the current dilemma of urban renewal in Beijing, new solutions need to be explored. As of 2007, social housing development has been re-emphasized in China. Among the new social housing policies, the renewal of old housing areas is listed as an important theme by the government. In Beijing, some new strategies for urban renewal have been tested. These latest attempts include:

The rehabilitation of historical Hutong areas In the historical conservation areas of the old city, the municipal government of Beijing has ﬁnally abandoned the ambition for wholesale reconstruction. The small-scale and gradual rehabilitation of historical Hutong areas was initiated in 2008 with the aims of “Renovation, Improvement and Evacuation”. The new approach combines housing renovation and reconstruction and is planned to improve living conditions (see ﬁgure 2). In order to decrease the residential density of these populous areas, the government has provided attractive rehousing conditions to encourage the relocation of residents³. At the same time, the private purchase and restoration of courtyard houses are promoted.

“Pinggaipo” project - a renovation program in the former public housing areas

Figure 2) The housing renovation in a historical Hutong area

For the “later” developed former public housing areas4, which are absent from the reconstruction plan, the government supports urban renovation. These renovation projects are mostly identified by the replacement of flat roofs with pitched roofs (for the purpose of aesthetics and improved insulation) and are often referred to as “Pinggaipo” (‘flat to pitched’) projects. In Beijing, “Pinggaipo” projects were largely initiated after 2007 and often publicly funded. As well as roof replacements, these projects would also usually consist of repainted facades, the repair or replacement of building components, landscaping and improved communal facilities (see figure 3).

The new rehousing strategy for urban reconstruction 3) If a household involved the rehabilitation chooses to relocate in resettlement housing out of the old city, the replaced housing area will be equivalent to at

least 1.75 (for public housing) – 1.85 (for private house) times of its original housing ﬂoor area.

The latest proposal for urban reconstruction focuses on the modiﬁcation of Beijing’s rehousing strategy. In 2009, a new municipal decree on rehousing was announced with two creative emphases: the prioritization of eligible households to apply for newly developed social housing, and compensation for housing expropriation in accordance with “market price”. Some pilot projects for the reconstruction of decrepit housing areas have been launched according to these new strategies. In January 2011, new national legislation was introduced that demands all property expropriations to be sentenced in court, thus reducing the government’s inﬂuence.

4) Since most of socialistic public housing has been privatized via the radical housing reform, those housing areas have to be named as former socialistic public housing areas.

Figure 3) The implementation of a

“Pinggaipo” project

Public participation in urban renewal The current renewal strategy has also caused an increase in public participation as well as a more transparent decision-making process. Residents are beginning to have more opportunities to influence decision-making. Negotiations for rehousing have changed from “black-box” discussions to public announcements. At the same time, residents now have more input into the design process. Public participation is now an integral part of the urban renewal process. Although the new urban renewal strategy in Beijing is a welcome improvement, it has not overcome many of the existing issues, and, to a certain degree, has brought new problems. The “Pingaipo” projects in many cases have only beautified the urban environment rather than fundamentally improved living conditions. Furthermore, public participation is often manipulated for private benefit. In an urban housing stock where the property ownership is the priority over the housing right, the emphasis

The “Pingaipo” projects in many cases have only beautified the urban environment rather than fundamentally improved living conditions. 28

of the market-oriented rehousing in whatever the reconstruction or rehabilitation will not avoid the displacement of low-income residents but induce socio-spatial segregation. In general, the urban renewal of Beijing is still bound to the capitalized and speculative housing stock and therefore cannot get away from conﬂicts of interest.

The existing challenge The dilemma of urban renewal in Beijing is not just an issue of urban planning but of society as a whole. Different from western civilized society, traditional Chinese society was identified by its centralized, hierarchical structure, of which the collective comes before the individual. The centrally controlled, planned socialism in a sense inherited this top-down tradition, which in many aspects still influences the present social, economic and political mechanisms of China. But through the transition from the planned economic system to the “socialistic market economic system”, China has been involved in the process of globalization, and thus is undergoing the radical social diversification, stratification and polarization that comes parcel with it. In this “modernization” (which to a certain extent means westernization) process, the traditionally top-down mode of public intervention inevitably has to change in order to adapt to an increasingly diversified urban society. However, the misunderstanding and superstition of the term “free market”, which is visible in the over-privatization and capitalization of housing stock, did not contribute to a balance but rather intensified social polarization and conflict. Without the tradition of bottom-up collectivism, the

“The capitalized private interests in urban renewal have been unprecedentedly exaggerated.” rising, sometimes unlimited sense of individualism is challenging traditional nations of authority, but is increasingly manipulated by capital. The distinction between the public and the private, as well as the collective and the individual, has been further blurred. In this transitional society, there are not only social, economic and political considerations but also ethical and moral ones. In comparison with western modern society, which can be summarized to be established under a hybrid ethos, the contemporary Chinese society is identified by the hybrid of ethos. The dilemma of urban renewal precisely presents this hybrid situation. On the one hand, there are individualized, diversified, but to a certain extent socialoriented requests; and on the other hand, it is the dominant approach of topdown, unitary, and often market-driven urban reconstruction. The conflict of interest is thus inevitable. In particular since the housing privatization and marketization, urban renewal has become a means to accelerate GDP growth, and the capital and the political power increasingly tie up. The so-called “residents” should not be regarded as one group who are only fighting for their housing right, but have differentiated into different interest groups – the occupied homeowners, the non-occupied landlords and the new tenants of private-rented housing, the latter of which are still largely neglected in the existing mechanism of urban renewal. The capitalized private interests in urban renewal have been unprecedentedly exaggerated, whatever in the form of profit-hungry real estate investment or individual housing speculation. But preceding the serious conflicts between private interests, the public interests of urban renewal, such as social integration, economic sustainability, historical conservation, environmental effect, and, most importantly, the housing rights of people, are ironically ignored. The originally proposed, social objective of urban renewal, which means to solve the urban housing problem and to improve the integrated urban development, has been distorted and alienated. Therefore, the most critical challenge for the urban renewal in Beijing is to answer a key question: How to balance the differentiated and conflicting interests on the one hand, and to recover the social objective of urban renewal on the other? In order to answer this question, the alternative urban renewal strategies instead of the unitary approach of market-oriented reconstruction, such as social housing intervention, socio-economic revitalization, social and programmatic mixture, community participation, as well as physical renovation/rehabilitation, are still awaiting to be explored.

Vertical Village

the why factory

Urban villages are a common typology in many Asian cities. The densequarters in Shenzhen, the hutongs in Beijing or the kampungs in Jakarta all are part of this urban phenomenon. Where Asian cities grow and become more dense, the urban villages are under pressure. They are being demolished at an increasing pace. To replace them, large fields of repetitive, monotonous blocks are being built. The new blocks may answer the need of comfortable apartment space, but they lack the social coherence, spatial diversity and flexibility that the complex urban villages can provide.

VerticalVillage© project by The Why Factory i.s.m. MVRDV Winy Maas, Hui-Hsin Liao, Ulf Hackauf Workshop “VillageMaker” by The Why Factory, TU Delft, Berlage Institute Tutors: Winy Maas, Daliana Suryawinata, Ulf Hackauf, Jeroen Zuidgeest,

The VerticalVillage© project proposes an alternative. Dense urban villages, stacked to allow for the necessary height, informal and ﬂexible, individual and evolutionary. The vertical village allows for ﬂexible use. It includes open public spaces, organized by tenant communities. It growths evolutionary, reacting to the needs of its inhabitants. Individual units can shrink or extend over time or change their function. It combines the quality of a village with the density of the city. The concept of the VerticalVillage© has been develop in various studios, workshops and individual research projects. The outcome is currently combined and edited, leading to a mayor exhibition in Taipei in August 2011.

Participants: Alfred Ho, Eduard Lepp, Zhiwei Lu, Chao Yue, Lingxiao Zhang, Ulrich Gradenegger, Magnus Jørgenson, Timur Karimullin, Hyun Soo Kim, Riemer Postma, Yushang Zhang, Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Maria Iglesias Martinez, Sangbo Park, Giorgio Ponzo, Yuichi Watanabe, Maarten Filius, Karel van der Kaaij, Gretha Kuurstra, Pei-Lin Hsieh, Chu Liu, Neslihan Parmaksizoglu, Sijme

In the MSc program of the Why Factory, a studio and a workshop were held under the topic of the VerticalVillage©.

van Jaarsveld, Vesna Jovanovic, Wannes Peeters, Rajiv Sewtahal, Ji Hyun Woo, Tzu-Hua Wu, Chien-Ting Chen, Barbara

Workshop “VillageMaker”

Costantino, Chun-Yu Hsu, Ivan Kur-

In the workshop, the challenge of evolutionary vertical urbanism was tested with a game-like set up. Six groups worked for six days on a plot of 50 x 50 metres, arranging pixilated housing units in an optimized spatial conﬁguration. The designs were build in physical models, scale 1/100. Each group aimed at optimizing one parameter: Access, Energy, Economy, Structure, Climate, Community. Within one day, each group planned 200 units, simulating the growth of a village over the course of two to three years. The next day, the models were rotated and each group added 200 more units to the previous design. The spatial challenges were translated into rules and guidelines, forming the base of an planning software.

niawan Nasution, Christy Sze, Zhouer Wang, Na An, Raquel Drummond, Andreas Faoro, Sebastian Haufe, Samia Henni, Taiwan Kim, Sarah Nichols, Stefano Pendini, Eliot Rosenberg, Kuba Skalimowski, Jung Hyun Woo Studio “5 Villages” by The Why Factory, TU Delft Tutors: Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdelov

Studio “5 Villages”

Participants: Alfred Ho, Eduard Lepp,

In the studio, ﬁve villages were planned on the scale 1/500. The designs are less abstract and show possible real versions of vertical villages. Each design is based on a different hypothesis, related to lifestyle cycles, rural romanticism, multiple natural environments, a collective void or 3-dimensional diffusion. Each design illustrates the unpredictable results of evolutionary vertical growth. The designs propose different growth protocols and structural principles. The diversity of the designs lie both in the overall conﬁguration and in the detailed living spaces.

Riemer Postma, Yushang Zhang, Maarten

The Why Factory, March 2011

Photography by:

Filius, Karel van der Kaaij, Gretha Kuurstra, Neslihan Parmaksizoglu, Sijme van Jaarsveld, Eliot Rosenberg, Kuba Skalimowski, , Sebastian Haufe, Rajiv Sewtahal, Christy Sze, Timur Karimullin

Frans Parthesius Netherlands

A Changing Attitude towards Urbanism Interview Luuk Boelens This interview is about the work Luuk Boelens has done with his office Urban Unlimited on transformation topics and how this relates to current events. Furthermore, we get to know more about their innovative mapping methods, which lie at the basis of the office’s philosophy. Combined, these insights provide a basis for the argument of a new attitude towards urbanism. Urban Unlimited was founded by Luuk Boelens and Wies Sanders in 2000. Their aim is to link the developments in the network society and the daily reality of governance and construction by means of plan making, research, design and the creation of conceptual stories. Urban Unlimited attempts to transform agendas of spatial processes in a very early stage of the process.

‘The problem we have to deal with in the Dutch context is the need of an annual realization of 80.000 houses because otherwise the whole building sector will collapse. This sector is organized completely different in other European countries. In Belgium just as in Nordrhein-Westfalen or England they build up to 35.000 houses a year. This situation is due to the historical development

Over the past decade Urban Unlimited has been involved in transformation and vacancy assignments. Does this still influence your work agenda? ‘Some years ago we developed the ReUrbAn toolbox and other reports on that topic. While at the moment our projects are not directly related to it, the issue of transformation and regeneration will always have an important influence on the real estate market. ReUrbA was our first assignment relating to restructuring existing urban areas. The province of South Holland commissioned this assignment. What makes their approach specific is the fact that it is a sequential way of restructuring areas. At first they deal with the neighborhoods from the fifties and then they move on to the sixties. Followed by moving on to the so-called ‘Bloemkoolwijken’ built in the seventies (cauliflower neighborhoods, due to their specific structure). We outlined the consequences of this sequential approach in 2000. We can already anticipate that all Vinex housing built at that time will most likely be the next transformation assignment. Terrible neighborhoods like Vinex already have many transformation and restructuring possibilities you can and should start with. But there is not much action at this point, also due to the current economical crisis. My assumption is that this issue will return in a later stage.’

What could be a way of transforming these Vinex neighborhoods? 34

Figure 1. Toolbox ReUrbA, Transformation types

of our housing market in which the government took control after the Second World War. Back then they were solemnly concerned with expansion motivated by the rapid need of housing. They were not concerned with renovation. Currently many construction companies are ruined whereas at the same time the government retreats from its dominant role because of the lack of financial means. This leaves a situation for people organizing projects themselves. The ‘Kluswoningen’ (DIY-Homes) in Spangen, Rotterdam, are a nice example. I would like to do more in depth research about these Kluswoningen. Trying to figure out the conditions and institutional context for success of such projects. Why does this happen in Rotterdam and to some extend in The Hague whereas nothing like this happens in Amsterdam and Utrecht? This restructuring method is particularly beneficial to young professionals but also pays off in terms of energy costs in a later stage. In the next years our energy expense for our homes is going to grow tremendously. There-

do the same in Amsterdam.’

There are also examples of residential houses built in churches. ‘Churches are difficult to use for such projects because their dimensions pose problems (height, funky tower). We have done a similar project in Noord-Brabant. We worked on monasteries, which are far easier adaptable than churches. Churches and monasteries have a very clear meaning to people. Transforming these into something new leaves the question of what is left of the archetypical value of that specific building. The archetypical value of a building is not important to me. It is all about the value of how it is being used. I find it a pity that housing is often incorporated in monasteries. Even when it is being done with respect to

"The archetypical value of a building is not important to me. It is all about the value of how it is being used." fore the existing housing stock ought to be made (more) energy efﬁcient. But the question is whose task this is. A similar approach like in the seventies with subsidies is not realistic since our government has run out of money. A new concept to counter this problematic aspect is necessary because people will not accept paying twice their energy costs all of a sudden. Self-organized projects could be such a concept. We try to adapt the vocabulary in the profession - with ReUrbA transformation principles to the notion that our existing housing stock is sufﬁcient and proper. This street for example, Graaf Florisstraat in Rotterdam, has seen 20 rebuilding projects in the past 80 years. These are projects like hotels, shops, business corporations, housing, etcetera.’

Many office buildings in the Netherlands are vacant. Could this also be because they are more difficult to transform as opposed to residential buildings? ‘I do not know why ofﬁce buildings would not be adaptable. People often assume there are little possibilities. But there are many possibilities, even within large ofﬁce buildings. Joep van Lieshout invented all kinds of built-in designs and worked with his atelier on a wide range of temporary occupational projects. We tried to

the archetypical value of the building, the original function is still lost. What we ﬁnd interesting, and what we have been doing, is looking for functions that align with the community that belongs to the monastery. We investigated different monastery communities in Noord-Brabant and worked on activating a network around these monasteries, dealing with appropriate functions and not necessarily with the building itself. There are different social divisions in monasteries. The ﬁrst consists of the Benedictines, which lives by the motto “ora et labora” (prey and work) and deals with the cultivation of land and the brewing of beer. Second are the Augustines. This is about science, books and writings. This is also the foundation of all our universities today. Thirdly, the Franciscans are about health care. So actually there are many functions that can relate to these communities. A health farm or a brewery for example seems to be quite appropriate. However, a baby commodity store in a former church like the one in Noord-Holland is a clear mismatch. A good example is a church that has been transformed into a hotel in Maastricht. A hotel relates to a church’s ancient function of residing. So with transformation assignments it is far more important to think in terms of the software (use) and the ‘orgware’ (organizational model) than in terms of 35

ture chaos but then by different kinds of maps right?

hardware (building). I ﬁnd that at the faculty of Architecture they are mostly concerned with the hardware, while if you also look at the software you are far more capable of doing something virtually everywhere.'

'These are all depicting means to express information which has become a new way of doing it since the last couple of years. I ﬁnd that the competence of the urbanist, who is skilled in depicting something. The image does not have to be realized exactly, we just use these images to enable a conversation with people. We are continuously occupied with images. In the book Urban Connection four sets of maps can be found which Wies Sanders and I made. Susan Hiller wrote about it, it is just a different way of making maps and utilizing them. On the contrary, Land Use plans still are coloring pictures with separations as living has to be here, working there and recreation ought to be over there. If you are of the opinion that the government is not the most important sir who is supposed to do that, then we really need new kind of maps.'

What ought to be the role of the urbanist in these transformation topics? 'An urbanist should be the one facilitating processes. Urban designers cannot start any big revolution. To me the economical crisis is a bless. People seem to realize now they cannot continue like the way they have been doing things for the last 20 or 30 years. That means an emergence of new assignments, a new way of working.' It seems Urban Unlimited is transgressing from the traditional urbanist’s work of making structure plans and land use plans.

Urban Unlimited makes maps following Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘Tracing, Mapping, Diagrams and Agencies. Does this reveal certain patterns that you can use for policy making?

´As the word already implies, structure plans attempt to structure chaos. The appointed person doing that apparently knows the manifestation of both of these words and stands above and steers society. I do not believe in the effective use of structure plans. I do not want to put an end to them immediately but besides the structure plans and land use plans we need different plans. I actually want to go beyond the plans. We need a coalition.´

‘Tracing is actually like what we have been doing for the KAN-Atlas in which we tried to understand the area. I did not know Arnhem and Nijmegen at all, so we started to make maps to ﬁnally conclude that it really is a weird area. Eventually we proposed to make multiple structure

But eventually even Urban Unlimited attempts to strucNightwatch Shrift

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Obedience Poverty and chastity Placebound

Strict order (against the decay in Cluny)

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Poverty Worldly preaching

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Augustinus alliance with higher education training, language, editors and culture facilities

shoed unshod intellect and poverty

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Birgittinessen Benedictus alliance with agricultural, heritage and food institutions

Yards around a chapel

Figure 2. Genealogy of Brabantse Monastry orders

Broeders van OLV van Lourdes Education and care Missions and refugeework

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2002 Verborgen schatten

Maas Maas

Figure 3. The KAN, a secret map (KAN-Atlas)

plans instead of just one, a proposal that was rejected. ‘Tracing’ is a good method to obtain an understanding of the area, the Genius Loci. However, these are needed to make a ‘Change Map’ to ﬁnd the right parties to work with.’ These are examples of maps depicting city layers that are freely interpretable. To what extend do you believe it to be possible to achieve a smart system of layers enabling patterns to emerge? Even resulting in what Rene Uytenhove terms a ‘super causality model.’ 'A pre-condition would be that all data should be gathered in one place. Because now it is very likely that every area in The Netherlands has been drawn at least a hundred or maybe even a thousand times. But perhaps such system it is not even always necessarily. Many datascapes are being made nowadays but I easily lose my interest in these. They often do not reveal anything else but the data. From this point urbanists should pick up this information and start giving it some meaning. Besides that, it is important to organize alliances and keep track of them so continuous change can occur. The institutional side is very essential. Whatever you are mapping needs to have a purpose. For the KAN-Atlas we chose to show people that they are having a really weird region. Eventually they just asked us to do a Structure Plan again.’

Will we have such a system gathering all city data in the foreseeable future? ‘It is already heading in that direction. Since a new law passed obligating municipalities to deliver land use plans online we have such a system. Eventually even your mom can look up if her neighbor actually had the right to attach something onto his roof if it spoils her view.’

However, this system is far from interactive. ‘They are being updated I suppose. As a citizen it is not that much helpful. However, the accessibility is just the ﬁrst stage.'

Nevertheless, the municipality of Rotterdam has a website on which people can give feedback to the city. Amsterdam has a similar model although it is organized differently. Are these nice examples of open-source online democracy? ‘These models constantly leave it up to the government for something eventually to happen. Essentially it is just an information channel for the municipality about urban transactions. Eventually someone has to go ﬁxing a tile here or there. I think it could get much more interesting. Have a look at this neighborhood for example. A building around the corner has been bought collectively and we organized this ourselves. Because there are so many designers living in this neighborhood we also made maps. 37

Having said that, neighborhood without this beneﬁt can be helped. This seems like a more reasonable future. Making maps together and discuss them.'

So what then is left of the role of the government? ‘The government should not be a controlling entity but an archiving one, a system administrator. Although I do not believe that VROM has to abolish. Eventually plans, like those from this neighborhood, need to be archived to fit in a juridical frame. Their job is not to make structure plans but imbed information in law and regulation, like a land use map. This is basically the only legal document but still representatively anchored in democracy. In spite of that, land use maps are being made in such a way that future developments just have to fit in. What might be better is an ambiguous system of archiving and filing at the end. The probability of collectively seizing a window of opportunity is most likely to grow in this scenario. I believe in associations. I call this associative democracy, next to representative democracy. Representative means

tiatives and more of the like. But will people even do all that then? ‘We ought to get back the mentality for doing so simply because the healthcare state, is bankrupt. Within the practice of spatial planning it is said: “Centralize what must be regulated centrally and decentralize everything else.” But I would add: start with the existing city, the existing housing stock. The current financing model has to be different. Many developers bought plots that they want to get rid of. Until now inner city projects could only be financed because of the governmental financial support. Everything at the Kop van Zuid area in Rotterdam has been realized with governmental money. The government does not have the money to finance everything like they did in the 1980s and 1990s. There must be a new attitude: how we finance and with whom. Possibly in a much lower tempo than the construction of 80.000 houses annually. In Antwerp they build approximately 500 houses a year and are already working on the project “Het Eilandje” for twenty years now. A similar area like the Kop van

"The government should not be a controlling entity but an archiving one, a system administrator." that once every four years you choose a member for the parliament to see things fit for you. Associative is a more direct manifestation of democracy like we are doing here in this street. However, associative democracy has been re-organized in such a way it got out of the picture since the 1950s. Water policy used to be a very direct way of how people were dealing with water management. At this moment it is ever more embedded within politics. Housing corporations also used to be a very direct form of associative democracy. I want to get back to the essence of some people who gather money and build a house together. That also is the way housing corporations once started. After WOII they depended upon the government to be finally privatized in 1990. Nowadays they are handling such big amounts of money that even the European Union finds it inappropriate.’

So is it up to the citizen to become active and take things into own hands? ‘That requires a different mentality. We have grown up with the idea that everything is being taken care of for us. I cannot even do it anymore, because everything used to be done for us by the government. We have gotten lazy.’

You appeal a lot to private entrepreneurship, citizen’s ini38

Zuid and the Eastern Habor district have been realized in just ten years. Because there is no such pressure from the housing market in Antwerp as in Dutch cities everything is going at a slower pace. If you really want it to be different then everything has to be re-invented. There must be a new attitude towards urbanism. Eventually this creates much more revolutionizing and interesting living environments.' (JB & EH)

Polis activities Spoorzone Delft, a case study Thursday March 10th, early morning: students of the Faculty of Architecture gather in front of the old Delft Central Station building. They will work on a design contest organized by the development agency Spoorzone Delft, local residents’ organization WesD and Polis. This contest, which is also a case study, is an opportunity for the students to work on a realistic problem related to a real project. The case study of Spoorzone Delft aims to deliver original designs for numerous areas that will be unoccupied after the new train tunnel in Delft has been constructed. The students worked in three design teams, each team ending up with very different design results. The professional jury was very positive about the wide range of designs for the new Spoorzone project. The plans vary from concepts for new event areas to modular student housing. Eventually these designs are meant as an incentive for further research and design. The plan proposals can be found on polistudelft.nl. Further information about the Spoorzone project is available at spoorzonedelft.nl

Figure 1. Excursion photo Antwerp, the Quays

The Antwerp-excursion; the contrast between dreams and reality As part of a one day-excursion to Antwerp, organised by Polis, two lectures were prepared by city officials, Tinne van Deven and Peter Claeys from the Antwerp Department of Urban Planning. In his lecture on the Groene Singel, Claeys explained that the department’s ambitions were always high during the project. However, due to political changes, economic recession and other factors the project could not be realized as intended. Claeys argument was that the department’s ambitions of the Groene Singel have always been high. However, due to political changes, economic recession and other factors the project could not be realized as intended. But what he showed and proved is that having strong conceptual frameworks is the key to realizing the original intentions of a project. He showed the contrast between the municipality’s dream and the reality of this. The end result of the Groene Singel design consists of several concepts called: ‘Daring to dream of a green river’, which precisely captures the content of the design. The design deals with the area between the buildings and the ring road. For a city like Antwerp, which does not have sufficient public green space, this no-man’s land is a precious area, and this design provides a toolbox for future development in these areas. When a new initiative eventually starts in this area, the design should fit within this toolbox. This way the area will develop in a consistent design in the long term, without having to develop it all at once. The second lecture by Tinne van Deven regarded the redevelopment of the Antwerp waterfront, and showed the fascinating history that shaped the quays. In the 19th century the narrow streets towards the curved quay were demolished and the quay was put straight in front of the water edge as a new front. Today the harbour activities have been transferred to the new port outside of the city centre, which as a consequence leaves an empty desolated quay. The area has a huge potential, but in the end the city planners want to maintain the open ‘windy’ industrial look it has nowadays. Some members of the excursion wondered whether this was the right way of designing, since examples like de Boompjes in Rotterdam show that too much open space is not always successful. All things considered, the developments in the city of Antwerp were a great example of the contrast between ones dreams and reality.

Explorative Urbanism series - Ekim Tan World of Citycraft - Game based design for interactive citymaking The Explorative Urbanism Series addresses new ways of dealing with the city by the use of new media and technologies.

Ekim Tan is a doctorate researcher at the Delft University of Technology and International Newtown institute. Her

Currently you are doing a PhD on ‘Agency 2.0: towards an adaptive environment for human habit.’ What was your inspiration for this topic?

work mainly concentrates on the interactive design of cities based on theories of self-organization. In the meantime, she is

‘At the time when starting my PhD I was imagining a methodology that makes the design stage in the Netherlands more adaptable. When advancing in my PhD I came to realize that the Dutch planning system is a very complex system of institutions and organizations, each with their own unique internal mechanisms. This triggered me in my work on creating a more adaptable planning and design system. The fascination started with the book about complexity theory by Portugali, a professor of the Tel Aviv University in Israel. What the book mainly argues is that the city is not only made up by planners or based upon prediction. Even when a design is implemented the city largely evolves through time by the people ﬂocking in and out. The city has always been a self-organized system and nowadays we are trying to understand its internal logic. I come from Istanbul. Being a resident of that city, one observes individuals with an urgency to dwell, not only building their homes they also establish parts of the city, some of which in time grow into economically sustainable and socially coherent neighborhoods. This is unique evidence that some of the cities do emerge and can evolve regardless of a lack of professionals. We have to recognize the energy, knowledge and experience of citizens being able to form cities.’

active building an international research and design practice TReC (The Responsive City Network).

There is a strong call for different ways of planning and shaping the city. These are being expressed in terms of participatory urbanism, read-write urbanism and non-plan architecture to list a view. To what degree do you align yourself with these idioms and how was TReC ‘The Responsive City Network’ born? ‘I would love to hear that strong call louder. However, the term participatory urbanism is a paradox in itself because the participatory planning paradigm is based on the consignment of a top town body. A top down organization such as the municipality cannot organize a bottom up plan. As opposed to participatory urbanism, responsibility deﬁnes who is doing what and when. The term responsivity, that I try to deﬁne in my thesis, is recognizing the top down forces making the city but also recognizing the bottom up forces complementary to that. For some tasks the government is well suited for the job while some tasks are better done by citizen’s. Some things people know themselves better than any professional or the state. Responsibility is about reacting to issues, hence responsive. ‘The Responsive City’ (TReC) was born from a successful design workshop we organized for INTI [International New Town Institute]. The workshop was part of my PhD, investigating a bottom up organized informal system. This 40

Figure 1. WOC-model

workshop (Almere Haven) also included a city game. We asked students to plan an expansion of Almere Haven in an improvised bottom up way. They started with an empty site plan and mockups which restrained the density we deﬁned for the development. There were certain rules: The game should be played in player sequence and previously made decisions must be respected. There are no design rules but only organizational rules. What this game showed was that it is possible to design an incrementally growing city with no preset design rules. Rules can be negotiated and deﬁned by the participants as they act and interact.’

How did you imagine using game elements as an interface for interactive design? ‘Design by gaming is not necessarily our invention. Whether it is from 30 or 100 years ago, knowledge is out there. It is only about how you combine things and when and in which context. Combinations of variations give the uniqueness of the work you are doing. In our work you could trace a big influence back to Huizinga, a Dutch writer in the 1930s. His book ‘Homo Ludens’ is about human play and is fascinating in its findings on learning through playing. Although he does not make a direct connection to city planning or urban design. Cristopher Alexander is another scholar who influenced TReC’s work. In the 1980’s for a waterfront design in San Francisco Bay he held workshops in which designers gathered around a big model and started designing together in sequence without an overall vision..’

After Almere Haven, we know you designed a game in Rotterdam’s neighborhood Het Oude Westen. The next city game took Istanbul as a context, which was called Yapyaşa. What were the effects of the Yapyaşa project on your opinion of how such a gaming interface could be used and implemented? ‘The context of Istanbul was without a doubt the communication aspect of gaming. The urban transformation going on in Istanbul is quite complex. In particular transformations of former illegal neighborhoods to a more

gentriﬁed neighborhood are very troublesome. It is in here that people resist these transformations because they have built their own neighborhoods. They know how hard it is, they have put all the money they made in their life into it. You have to imagine conditions are tense and discussion on urban design is polarized. Local residents and the central housing corporation hardly have any contact with each other in Turkey. We considered the game as therapy for bringing diverse isolated actors together for a constructive get-together, to talk about the city and to envision her future.’

What were the proceedings of bringing different actors in an open dialogue with one another? ‘An important dimension in the game was roll exchange. The participants could choose their identities (avatar) and were given some missions and data. Commercial planners adjusted to the role of citizens for example and citizens became a developer or even mayor. It was immensely interesting to see the majority of residents taking up the role of developer very easily and the kind of arguments they adopted for using. There were two episodes in the game. During the first episode players could profile themselves, take position and negotiate with one another. In the second part the mayor needed to be elected. The first episode was simulation the existing conditions like the power relations right now in Istanbul. This means a housing corporation with a total top down planning strategy so there is no need for negotiation with the residents. Nevertheless, we exchanged people’s game roles to calm them down a bit. In the second episode players could elect a new mayor. By choosing a new mayor players also choose for a new vision on the way of changing the neighborhood in the game. With the arrival of a new mayor the power relation between actors shift. That means that the housing corporation might now only control 50 percent of the area for example. This allows possibilities for residents to have the right to build. An instance like this differentiates the negotiation system housing corporations are used to. As a result people become much more willing to build together.’

"We considered the game as therapy for bringing diverse isolated actors together for a constructive get-together."

To what extent did these seemingly top-down game rules create a bottom-up framework for the Yapyaşa game? ‘It is a framework of rule based design. You make rules that people can apply and understand easily but then you leave it to them. Having said that, it is really important to make a differentiation between prescriptive rules and proscriptive rules. Prescriptive rules prescribe every little design detail whereas proscriptive rules enables more openness and creativity. For the Yapyaşa game we wanted to experiment with proscriptive design rules to achieve a somewhat parametric system. For such a system to occur I am sure some basic constraints have to be set. It is possible to play the game without any design rules but these design rules can guarantee a certain quality of space. A proscriptive rule for example was a maximum of five floor levels. Anything is acceptable, so long as it does not exceed five floor levels. An additional kind of rule are relational rules. These enable the user to exceed those five floor levels if a certain amount and quality of public space is offered in return. The simplicity of these rules are very important I discovered. Game ground rules as such were provided in a top down manner. For half a year we were working on those rules to test it ourselves whether it actually works. So being able to provide these ground rules is the most difficult part. In a self-organizing system the order of a system emerges at the very first round, so in the early stage. Henceforth it is very important you make the right decisions at the beginning. These kind of design measures were also introduced out of respect for our own design profession. Besides, we have been taught at least some things about designing. It should not be as in the 1970s when designers let other people design for them instead. Nevertheless I also have to respect certain knowledge of people which I lack. This can be assessed but eventually I have to be able to express what I know as a designer.’

At the moment your ideas of Yapyaşa are being transformed into the World of Citycraft. A name derived form the game World of Warcraft. The World of Citycraft is a digitized version of the Yapyaşa game model. What are the envisioned benefits of this concept? ‘We mainly realized we needed to use social media

because it enables so many more people to join the game. The analogue game can be played with only 20 to 30 people in a session, but with a digitized version the game could perhaps be played with thousands of people. In spite of that, we never wanted to loose the analogue dimension of the game if we went digital. The most important decisions are always made face to face in the real world. Even the type of commitments people make digitally are different. We are now researching what it means for the digital model if the Yapyaşa methods are adapted and how the analogue and the digital inﬂuence each other. Already there are interesting initiatives on the internet. Take the Verbeter de buurt website (Better my Neighborhood) for example, If you trace some of the ﬂags, it says ‘problem solved.’ So apparently someone is checking the problem statements. The municipality could deal with this kind of feedback model in two ways. They could be monitoring the website, seeing complaints and take action. Somebody else would have to check if this action actually did happen. Another way to deal with this feedback model is to truly host the website and administrate it. That is why responsibility is so important. You have to have the bottom up and top down bodies communicating with each other.’

How do you think the Dutch state could eventually position itself in this system of analogue and digital conveyance of information, ideas and designs? ‘I can not imagine total exclusion of the state. But even some hopeful projects that happen in the Netherlands are still totally top down. Duivensteijn’s project in Almere for instance basically just has its bestemmingsplan (land-use plan) online. Each plot of the Homerouskwartier project has its own plot passport. It is in these digitally accessible passports you can see the rules to build, interested buyers etc. But the urban plan is ﬁxed so eventually it is limited freedom. By this Duivensteijn wanted to take out the housing corporation as the mediator for lower income people to built their own house more easily. Yet when it comes to interactive city making the role of the design profession means creating the right rule based design framework instead of virtually designing everything. Compared with a battleﬁeld computer game, you place your resources in the war zone and from there on

"When it comes to interactive city making the role of the design profession means creating the right rule based design framework instead of virtually designing everything." 42

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Figure 2. Word of citycraft - categorizing city games

Vacant NL, the Dutch entry at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010 created by Rietveld landscape, makes a powerful plea for reuse of the thousands of empty state-owned buildings to be found throughout the Netherlands. In their own words, the “installation ‘Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas’ calls upon the Dutch government to make use of the enormous potential of inspiring, unoccupied buildings from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries for innovation within the creative knowledge economy” (www.rietveldlanscape.com). The above picture shows the 4326 buildings that were documented in the Dutch Atlas of Vacancy and scale modeled in blue foam to be shown at the Biennale. The Dutch Association for Brokers (NVM) researched vacancy in the Netherlands in 2010, coming to the conclusion that 6.2 million square kilometers of ofﬁce space is vacant which is tantamount to 13% of the total stock, whereas at the same time at least 18.000 hectares of industrial estates need to be restructured. For the exhibition, Rietveld landscape focused on the more cultural and unique buildings to show the opportunities and potential for their (temporary) reuse in connection to the creative knowledge economy.

The Dialogue: China In The Dialogue we approach foreign students to talk about their opinions on TU Delft education and their experiences at the University. For this edition we approached some Chinese students, since they are overall ‘present’ at Urbanism. The big question ‘Why the Netherlands and TU Delft?’ was of course the first thing we addressed. It turns out that the Netherlands is generally quite an attractive place to study due to the low tuition fee for non-EU students compared to other countries. Everyone was already determined to do a Master degree outside of China and Delft stood out because of the English courses and recommendations by Chinese teachers, some of which graduated at TU Delft. Overall, TU Delft is associated with quality teaching. Our interlocutor’s educational background consists of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture. A fresh look on things seems to be the main motivation to enrol in Urbanism. This includes the conceptual point of view taught here. The importance of analysis had never been stressed so much before and above all, the need for a constructive narrative, a storyboard, struck them. By creating these narratives the students felt they were being left entirely on their own. Teachers here give only some directions whereas the Chinese teachers have more control over the process and the result. The teacher-student relationship is slightly different too, in China, and in many Asian countries, there is much more respect for teachers, up to the level of some sort of ‘father figure’. This is also due to the fact that teachers don’t shift that many times in a Chinese school career. The relationship with Dutch teachers is more informal, and because of this they will never be a father figure. When asked about their opinion on the Master 1 projects they find it a pity to only work on Dutch cities (Apeldoorn, Haarlem, Zwolle, Nijmegen), as they are incomparable in many cases with the big cities in China. There are not many generic solutions you can implement in a Chinese context. Nevertheless it is the methodology they learned in these projects that is of the utmost importance. Perhaps the advantage of studying a smaller size city for students new to Urbanism is that the mechanisms of that city are less complex to understand than 46

those of a city like Beijing. Subtly we also asked how it is to work with Dutch students. Whereas the Chinese reason mainly from the collective point of view, Dutch students mostly reason from the individual (personal) point of view. Furthermore Dutch students are very direct while Chinese, as politely as they can be, overall communicate their message in a more indirect manner. Suggestive notions resemble this mostly. Being in a different culture for only a brief time, some of the students have difﬁculties judging their social behaviour, or better yet what is expected of them. Because of this exploration of the ‘social rules’ many of them had times when they did not dare to express themselves and kept their opinions to themselves. But it is this cautiousness that sometimes also prevents them from rightfully participating and speaking their mind. Interesting to see is that after graduating everyone is very determined to go back to China. Perhaps working in The Netherlands for a year or two, but sooner or later they will all be going ‘home.’ Family and work opportunities are the main motivators for this. It seems the Chinese students are well aware of their ideas and actions, self-organized and willing to take on new ideas and try new ways. Taking some time during their student years to explore parts of Europe and ﬁnally going home with a fresh look on things, pursuing a career in the urban environment. The language binds all of them, which creates a natural bond to never feel totally alone in the low lands. In conversation with: Ye Yu, Shuang Deng, Lau Cherry, Qiu Ye, Tong Li, Lu Li, Yu Zhang, Nigel Yang and Yin Mu (EH)

Graduate List January 2011 More information on these projects can be found on repository.tudelft.nl

P P.

Figure 1. Potential recreational structure. P.J.M. Rosmulder

Lisa de Rooij Analysis methods for the regeneration of Dutch problem neighbourhoods Anna Gralka Transformation of post-industrial areas in Bytom: South Poland Marjolijn Bonnike VINEX: A future perspective Merel Peppelenbosch Update the 'bloemkoolwijk'. Spatial interventions for updating the late post-war neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Mark Berkhout Eventing the city: Het inzetten van festivals en evenementen om te komen tot multi-bruikbare openbare ruimten in de stad Michel Leunis Empowering Lines L. Houtman ALL Inclusive Jihye Lee EnvironMETROmix: Strategic Design Proposals for Amsterdam Zuid-Oost. Metro station environments and their Neighbourhoods in order to stimulate Urban Interdependence and Coherence in the District Charalampos Koutsoupakis Defining islands of innovation: High-tech clusters as an urban development strategy for the suburban area of Thessaloniki P.J.M. Rosmulder Dealing with leisure A.N.M. Koeling Improving the Connection: Transforming the Metropolitan station area of Hollands Spoor Rob Reintjes Facade of the new city image: An urban design for the Zee burgerpad, Amsterdam

Figure 2. Design Concept, Mulakkers. P.J.M. Rosmulder

MSc 2 Landscape Architecture Q3 - Teatro Urbano - Park Design in Urban Transformation Schoterbos Park Plan by laura spenkelink

Assignment The brief is the design of a park in a city district undergoing a process of consolidation, intensification and reconstruction. The center of this redevelopment is a new urban park, intended as the centerpiece in the redefinition of the identity, structure and meaning of this area of the city. The park brief calls for a design proposal that gives form to contemporary notions of nature, landscape and city. The central task is the landscape architectonic composition of the park: the definition and staging of (landscape) architectural elements in space and time, the accommodation of park programs, the composition of natural and cultural imagery, the design of elements and structures, the layout of park infrastructure and the resolution of threshold zones to the surrounding area. Attention is placed on the various scales of design: from the detailing of planting and materials to the role of the park in defining the form of the city.

SƟcking the park to its surroundings on special places

ConnecƟng the diīerent neighbourhoods and the park

connecƟng to polder

unprogrammed

connecƟng to the city

/ntensiĨy the program that is already there in the stripes that come Ĩrom the Įrst two concepts

2 ǌones that connect either to the city or the open landscape, with a buīer ǌone in between

Figure 1. Concept drawings explaining the design

The site

The site is the Jan Gijzen zone in Haarlem, located 20 km to the west of the city of Amsterdam. The Jan Gijzen zone includes the Schoterbos, the adjoining Noordersport complex and the junction of the Rijkstraatweg/Jan Gijzenkade, an important urban node in the north of the city. The Schoterbos is now in use as an informal public open space for Haarlem North. The city of Haarlem intends to restructure and develop the Jan Gijzen zone into a new center for Haarlem north comprising an urban node and a major landscape/recreation area. The new Schoterpark is to develop into a city park, a high quality public open space intended as a centerpiece for an upgrading of the whole urban area. The urban counterpart of the new Schoterpark is the intensiﬁcation of the node Rijksstraatweg/Jan Gijzenkade.

N Figure 2. Plan, Schoterbos, Haarlem-North

Figure 4. 3D impression - Church square & community gardens

Figure 3. 3d impression - Special place in the woods

Figure 5. Zoom in main path and bridge

Figure 5. 3d impression main path and bridge

Citizen (Dis)Empowerment in Urban Regeneration of Low-Income Neighbourhoods gabriela rendon

Urban decline and restructuring struggles in low-income and minority neighbourhoods have generated great concern among citizens and governments in the Netherlands, and many other West European countries. Since the 1970s a number of urban renewal policies and practices have tried to respond to the effects of socio-economic and political shifts; large scale deindustrialization, decline and decentralisation of employment in major cities, housing provision and welfare changes, as well as the evolution towards a multicultural society. The approaches undertaken have generated different degrees of power to make decisions at the local level. They have affected the relationship between the state and citizens, and have recently implied greater involvement of the private sector in urban renewal processes.

Gabriela Rendón is a Phd Candidate

In response to the opposition of residents, from the the mid 1970s autocratic mainstream programmes mainly based on demolition and reconstruction, gave way to new policy based on the socialisation and democratisation of housing and neighbourhoods. It was known as building for the neighbourhood1 since it focused mainly on urban improvement of inner city and post-war working class low-income neighbourhoods. The policy aimed to open up exclusionary urban plans to citizens, paying attention to their claims, while providing affordable housing and reducing massive displacement. Through building for the neighbourhood² residents were able to organise themselves and alter some political local arrangements. It produced changes in hierarchical structures in the city urban development department, giving citizens a share in decision making and control over their neighbourhoods. The policy lasted almost two decades, but by the end of the 1980s urban renewal programmes had already shifted direction from building for the neighbourhood to building for the city (Stouten 2010). During the 1980s new measures were taken by central government in response to economic recession and expenditure cuts. Local initiatives advocating social housing weakened and new market oriented approaches of housing provision strengthened. Privatisation, deregulation and decentralisation took place alongside a shift of power from central to local government and housing associations (Stouten 2010). By the end of the 1990s the outcome of market oriented strategies of urbanisation materialised in spatial and social segregation. While some areas prospered others declined in accordance with market oriented interest and ﬁnancing. Neighbourhood decline was manifested heavily in low-income and minority areas. In response to the intensiﬁcation and concentration of interrelated urban problems, urban policy has evolved and converged over the last two decades around a series of key features. They seek co-ordination and integration of economic, social and urban policies that used to work on an individual basis. There

1) For more information about Building

of the Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology, and a visiting faculty at Parsons the New School of Design in New York. She is also a co-founder and member of Cohabitation Strategies, a cooperative for socio-spatial research, design and development based in Rotterdam.

for the Neighborhood policy and practices, see Paul Stouten 2010.

Figure 1. Klushuizen in Tarwewijk, Rotterdam South.

has also been an increase of area-based approaches, a shift from government to governance, a growing use of local urban contracts as policy regulators, and once again, the recognition and encouragement of residents’ engagement in urban regeneration processes (Andersen and van Kempen 2003). These tendencies to more comprehensive and inclusive approaches are promising. However they have raised some questions in practice, especially in regard to the increased control by residents over neighbourhoods decisions on a non-exclusionary basis. Furthermore, in practice neighbourhood planning and regeneration seems to have been transferred to private entities rather than to citizens. This article is based on this conjecture arising from a research done in Tarwewijk, one of the most distressed and low-income districts of Rotterdam South that has been the target of current urban regeneration policies.

Urban Policy Towards Citizens In the Netherlands the previous policy features are reﬂected in the Big City Policy (Grotestedenbeleid), created in 1994 combining a number of ministries and subsidy schemes to revitalise major cities. It focuses on three interrelated so-called pillars – physical, social and economic – with an area-based approach in the four largest cities. One of the focal points of the physical pillar was the improvement of low-income inner city and postwar neighbourhoods tackling social and spatial segregation through the New Urban Regeneration Policy (Wet Stedelijke Vernieuwing). This policy aimed to enforce the diversiﬁcation of the housing stock through the development of more expensive houses in deprived neighbourhoods stimulating at the same time social mixture (Kruythoff 2003; Musterd and Ostendorf 2008). In year 2000 new arrangements were set increasing the areas from four to thirty large and medium cities. Once again, an area-based approach was used with the aim of ensuring market demands for housing in the long term, reducing social housing and increasing home ownership for middle and high income families (Van Kempen and Priemus 1999; Van Weesp 2000; Priemus 2004). In 2002, under the provisions of the Major City Policy a district-based programme nominated 56-Wijkenaanpak (56-district approach) was launched. Urban renewal targets, plans and agreements were planned under the coordination of councils and local partners. This programme was followed by the 40-Krachtwijken (40-empowered districts) action program in 2007 which is to be developed for the next 10 years. The main focus was to make a shift from districts of attention to districts of empowerment (van aandachtswijk naar krachtwijk). Working with residents, civil organisations and institu-

tions locally active was one of the critical goals to tackle urban problems associated with high unemployment and scarcity of jobs, homogeneous populations, rundown housing, deterioration of public spaces, drug nuisance, and illegal practices (vrom 2007). Alongside this initiative the 40+Wijken (40+Districts) program was launched two years later in districts with serious accumulation of problems which were not part of the previous 40 priority districts earmarked by former Minister Vogelaar (VROM 2009). In order to put policy into practice an Action Plan for Empowered Districts (Actieplan Krachtwijken) was formulated with different charters in cities around the Netherlands. Out of these charters a number of local neighbourhood action plans (wijkactieplanen) have been elaborated in city districts proposing initiatives and plans for urban and housing improvement fostering citizen involvement (vrom 2007). At the neighbourhood level resident organisations and steering groups have been formalised and others created autonomously or in collaboration with the previous local urban contracts. Local decision making of urban regeneration processes appears to be shared between the state and residents. However, the state is no longer the only entity in charge of urban transformations of low-income and minority neighbourhoods. The private real estate sector is also involved. Housing associations, private development agencies and financial institutions play an important role in planning and renewal operations (Albers 2006). In fact, these private initiatives together with local authorities are in charge of implementing the previous district-based approaches, while working in partnership in market oriented urban renewal and development projects in the same areas. Different strategies have taken place in targeted districts to fight against urban decline and social and spatial segregation, however significant influence and collaboration of residents in these strategies has been difficult to grasp. Disfranchised and deprived citizens, which are supposed to be empowered to transform their living environment have been frequently disempowered through different practices bringing up eviction and displacement (Rendon 2010).

Urban Practices towards the Real Estate Sector Over the last two decades housing has played an important role in the implementation of the previous district approaches, though in different ways and with changes in approach. Social housing has been reduced and homeownership has been increased. In addition, subsidies have shifted from direct to more indirect ones. For instance, local authorities are provided with a certain budget for housing production according to needs. And citizens 51

receive individual rent allowances only if warranted. Furthermore, the direction of housing policy has been oriented towards more market, less government (Boelhouwer 2002). Even when the state keeps maintaining a regulative and enabling role in housing provision, the financial and political commitment has been gradually transferred from the public to the private sector (Harloe 1995, Stouten 2010). Public-private partnerships have strengthened, commanding every aspect of housing provision, distribution and allocation today. Action plans in districts are mainly formulated by public-private partnerships according not only to the previous policies but also to the interest of city visions, housing policy and the real estate sector. For instance, in the city of Rotterdam it is evident that future plans aim to achieve housing and social improvement and heterogeneity not only for the sake of the most needy people, but also for the sake of profit and city image. A shift from a working to a ‘creative class’ is desired to attract new businesses and middle and high income citizens (Gemeente Rotterdam 2007). Public and private intervention in priority districts tends not only to reactivate mechanisms counteracting deprivation but also reversing property devaluation to reinsert these areas in the real estate market since those areas are generally owned or controlled by housing associations. Different strategies and programmes have been launched in these districts devised and supported by the state and local public-private partnerships. Initiatives as the Aankopen-Verbeteren-Verkopen Aanpak (PurchaseRenovation-Sale Approach), Koop je Huurhuis (Buy your Tenement), and Klushuizen (Job Properties) have successfully improved physical conditions, boosted the private housing sector, stimulated banks to supply mortgages, and provided the middle class with different choices of affordable housing (Figure 1). They have also complied with urban and housing policy agendas advocating heterogeneity (social and housing mix) even though relations between former and new residents, as well as social and ethnic groups, are frequently parallel rather than integrative (Uitermark, et al. 2007). However, these programmes stimulate individual rather than collective-based benefits as well as decisions hardly achieving neighbourhoodbased planning with standing resident engagement to reach a common ground. These urban practices barely empower marginalised citizens to achieve significant social and political change or to gain control over neighbourhoods. In fact, in many cases disenfranchised tenants are not taken into account, as in the case of Rotterdam where practices of eviction and exclusion are common to improve priority districts (Verwij 2010, 52

Gemeente Rotterdam 2010). In Rotterdam, as in many others cities, the maintain or sell approach (afschrijving) and the housing permit (huisvestingsvergunning) have been enforced by the municipality in order to de-concentrate low-income and minority citizens. The first measure forces owners through a legal order to maintain housing in good condition, otherwise it must be sold. With this measure housing stock is improved and illegal practices of slum landlords are eliminated, such as overcrowding and undocumented migrant accommodation. The housing permit, which is often referred to as Rotterdamwet (Rotterdam Law), constrains the influx of marginalized households to specific areas of the city while seducing the well-off ones to move into these areas, increasing the property values. It was introduced in Rotterdam in 2005 through the Wet Bijzondere Maatregelen Grootstedelijke Problematiek

Figure 2. Housing targeted for renewal in Tarwewijk, Rotterdam South.

(Law for Special Measures of Metropolitan Problems) to later be launched nation-wide to deal with the condition of the so-called priority districts. This licence does not apply to households residing in the city for more than 6 years, the private sector or rental housing above 647,53. It is enforced for specific households and in specific streets and districts, which most of the time have the lowest property values in cities and the highest concentration of interrelated urban problems, as in the west and southern districts of Rotterdam (Gemeente Rotterdam 2006, 2010). With the enforcement of this law people (mostly newcomers with fewer resources and privileges) are not allowed to move to the most affordable districts. Urban regeneration in targeted districts has achieved urban improvement through the previous locally-based policies and strategies (Figure 2). Housing has been updated, shifts in ownership have taken place, property values have increased, illegal practices have decreased and public spaces have been restored, unfortunately many times through fencing off and surveillance cameras. However social and economic development have not taken place and problems have moved to another place (Rendon 2011). People get uprooted in the process, as households residing in housing with substandard conditions or the ones not fulfilling the requirements of the Rotterdam Law. The question is where do these people go and therefore: how do these people take action in the transformation and development of their own district?

Disempowered vs. Empowered Urban Practices The previous facts and enquiries bring out a question regarding the recognition of citizen involvement in recent urban policy trends. Who formulates and implements plans and design and development strategies in the empowered districts (krachtwijken)? What can be explained from the previous ﬁgures is that central government is currently pushing urban and housing regeneration programmes placing citizens at the centre (Boelhouwer 2002). It can be explained also that those initiatives don’t seem to be always feasible and straightforward, but contradictory to interests and policies running side-by-side their objectives and concerns. While area-based programs promote inclusive and tailormade planning schemes led by citizens to achieve neighbourhood improvement and community development, urban regeneration practices at the local level tend to be set and led by public-private partnerships encouraging gentriﬁcation and community dissolution to achieve economic growth and to stabilize social order (Uitermark, et al. 2007). According to a grassroots group advocating tenants’ rights in many districts in Rotterdam, urban interventions are frequently undertaken without any or little

consent of households (Verwij 2010). Tenants are usually informed through one-way communication meetings, usually with owning properties in the area. Tenants in rental properties have less legal rights, and therefore have less say in decision making. This way of consultation has even been recognised by planning authorities in some neighbourhoods in Rotterdam, where urban regeneration programs have been conceptualised and formulated before being presented to residents (Vieter 2009). Central government also stated after evaluations that urban regeneration operations have been authoritarian despite consultation in some of these areas (VROM 2005). Urban policy addressing low-income and minority districts has certainly had positive effects through residents’ engagement through the democratisation of action plans in neighbourhoods. However the way of taking this into practice has not been progressive, neither has it been contextualised in today’s political and social condition. Consultation through different means has been common since at least 50 years ago in urban renewal regardless its insignificant role in making relevant decisions. Furthermore, it has been acknowledged that unlike real-democracy in districts – the power of people to collectively control the decisions that affect their economic and environmental futures – this sort of instruments pro citizen participation tend to react to official plans and programs rather that encourage people to propose their own goals, policies, and future actions (Arnstein 1969, Davidoff 1965). It is quite relevant then to recognise that neighbourhood-based plans may make a difference on key issues, but by ‘ignoring difference and diversity these plans will perpetuate inequalities in political power and fail to transform individuals and neighbourhoods’ (Angotti 2008). The interests of public-private partnerships have tended to neglect the value of the marginalised citizens, which due to exclusion and a system of consensus have struggled to be part of decision making processes, and therefore, action. It has been shown that in neighbourhood-based planning, solidarities of race, social and economic status, as well as common claims of social justice are powerful instruments for relatively powerless communities (Angotti 2008). The interests of the state, the real estate sector, residents, activists and advocate urban groups compete. Therefore, it is essential that practitioners understand and are able to manoeuvre between conflicting ideas and processes in urban transformative processes (Angotti 2008). Neighbourhood-based planning can not be linear and fixed, nor can it be produced and controlled by one group since the city is conformed by multiple interests and disciplines. Thus, urban, social and political change must come 53

from transformative processes overcoming the traditional division of practices and disciplines by bringing together housing and urban policy, progressive planning, community development and design with a wide range of experts who engage in the city for and with people.

Uitermark, J. Kleinhans, R. and Duyvendak, J.W. (2007) Gentriﬁcation as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam. Environmental and Planning A, vol 39, pp. 125-141. Verwij A. (2010) Interview of a member of Rotterdam in Actie at Cohabitation Strategies, interviewed by Gabriela Rendon, 5, March

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Urban Studies, 43(7), pp.1061-1086 Andersen, H.T. and Van Kempen, R. (2003) New Trends in Urban Policies in Europe: Evidence from the Netherlands and Denmark. Cities, 20(2), pp. 77-86. Angotti, T. (2008) New York for Sale: Community Planning Con-

VROM (2005) Betrokken Bewoners:: Burgerparticipatie in de stedelijke vernieuwing. Den Haag: VROM, December 2005 VROM (2007) Actieplan Krachtwijken: van aandachtswijk naar krachtwijk. The Hague: Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieubehher.

fronts Global Real Estate. London and Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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prove the quality of life in districts. [Online] Available at: http://in-

the American Institute of Planners, 35 pp. 216-224. Blokland, T. (2003) Urban Bonds: Social Relationships in an Inner City Neighbourhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boelhouwer, R. (2002) Trends in Dutch Housing Policy and the Shifting Position of the Social Rented Sector. Urban Studies, 39(2), pp. 219-235. Davidoff, P. (1965) Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31:4, p. 331-338. (November 1965) Gemeente Rotterdam (2007) StadsVisie Rotterdam 2007-2030. Rotterdam: Gemeenteraad Rotterdam. Gemeente Rotterdam 2010. Wat moet ik doen om een huisvestingsvergunning te krijgen? Rotterdam: Gemeente Rotterdam. Harloe, M. (1995) Social Housing and the ‘Social Question’: Housing Reform Before 1914. The People’s Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America. Oxford/Cambridge (UK): Blackwell, pp. 15-74. Kempen, R. van & Priemus, H. (1999) Undivided Cities in the Netherlands: Present Situation and Political Rhetoric, Housing Studies, 14-5, pp. 641-657. Musterd, S. and Ostendorf, W. (2008) Integrated Urban Renewal in The Netherlands: a Critical Appraisal. Urban Research and Practice, 1(1), pp. 78-92. Priemus, H. (2004) Housing and New Urban Renewal: Current Policies in the Netherlands. International Journal of Housing and Policy, 4(2), pp. 229-246. Rendon, G. (2011) Politics, Practices and Constrains of Socio-Spatial Restructuring through Citizens Active Engagement in Deprived Neighbourhoods: The case of Tarwewijk. Making Room for People. Amsterdam: Techne Press. Stouten, P. (2010) Changing Contexts in Urban Regeneration: 30 Years of Modernisation in Rotterdam. Amsterdam: Techne Press. Kruythoff, H. (2003) Dutch Urban Restructuring Policy in Action Against Socio-Spatial Segregation; Sense or Nonsense?. European Journal of Housing Policy, 3(2), pp. 193-215.

ternational.vrom.nl/pagina.html?id=41532 [Accessed 8 November 2009]. Weest J. van (2000) Housing Policy: The Link between Welfare and Economic Development. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 15 p. 165-181 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

From the field - BVR BVR is a consultancy for spatial issues. The work varies from integral and spatial plans to specific designs, accommodated with a realization-or development strategy. In every project the process and design are cross-linked, and new spatial-programmatic opportunities are generated. BVR has extensive experience in regeneration projects in post-war neighborhoods in the Netherlands. We talked about this with Bernadette Janssen, partner at BVR and expert in regeneration projects, who stresses that one should always take the strengths of a neighborhood as a starting point. Liliane Geerling, project leader and expert in the area of sustainability and innovation talks about the 7UP project, a strategy for the ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhood of Zevenkamp in Rotterdam. This projects shows a different and inspiring approach to regeneration. What are the major challenges when regenerating a city that will constitute a future portfolio for an urbanist? Bernadette Janssen: ‘In general, regeneration projects are very concerned with the problems in a neighborhood, with ﬁnding the social, spatial and/or economical weak spots. This can be seen, for instance, in the Vogelaar approach - which has now actually been revoked by the central government which is a great loss for the socalled problem neighborhoods within the Randstad. But to my mind, regeneration projects should focus more on the qualities within a neighborhood. We notice in our projects that sometimes people forget to look at the places where everything is going well. Take care of these places and try to improve the neighborhood on the basis of these

strengths. The 7UP project is an example of this approach. Too often it is only the problem areas that are highlighted. But prevention is better than cure. This is especially the case in neighborhoods that were built in the ‘70s and‘80s, which comprise the largest housing stock in the Netherlands. Approximately 30% of our stock was built between 1970 and 1985. At present, these neighborhoods function quite well, but decline is looming. We see that slowly the awareness is growing that regenerating these neighborhoods is becoming urgent. Many of these neighborhoods are now functioning quite well, but the problems are becoming more visible. The shortage on the housing market makes these dwellings rentable and sellable. But this could change when there is more space on the housing market and the unilateral housing of approximately 75% of all one-family houses cannot fulfill the needs anymore. Especially in shrinkage regions, the least attractive dwellings will foot the bill. The pre-war stock and the redeveloped ‘50s and ‘60s districts, located close to the city centre that are easily accessible, will become more valued than ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhoods. These family neighborhoods will also have to compete with new developments on the perimeter. But for years these problems were underestimated. Moreover, at the time that they were built no attention was given to sustainability. In that sense, the biggest regeneration assignment to come is transforming this large amount of housing stock into a sustainable environment. Eighty-five percent of the housing stock in 2020 will consist of dwellings which are already being built. We find that recently more people are beginning to see the necessity for management, sustainable transformation and betterment. One can see an increasing awareness and interest in retaining or, more to the point, improving the vitality and attractiveness of existing neighborhoods from the ‘70s and ‘80s.’ So regeneration of ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhoods will be a major assignment now and in the future. But it is not really ‘cool’ for a designer to deal with this. On the contrary, we see a boom in the design proposals for ’50s and ‘60s districts. When looking at the digital repository of the Urbanism Department of the last three years, it can be seen that many student projects deal with restructuring post-war ‘50s and ‘60s districts. Is there a difference between the ‘70s and ‘80s assignment and the transformation of the ’50s and ’60s districts?

Figure 1. Zevenkamp under construction

‘Urbanists and architects detest the formless structure, 55

"85% of the housing stock in 2020 will consist of dwellings which are already being built"

Figure 2. Three different dwellandscapes: suburban forest, canals or extremely enlarged gardens.

the ‘coziness’, and the small-scale of the ‘70s and ‘80s. On the other hand, hardcore modernism is cool. But we are seeing a shift in this Calvinistic profession. Under the influence of consumer-orientated building, modern traditionalism and the popularity of collectivity, a revaluation of these neighborhoods is visible. Today they are sometimes even used as a source of inspiration. The inhabitants have valued their environment quite highly for years, but this is declining. There are problems, but there’s a lot of quality as well. But you have to be willing to see that. However, the real love for the ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhood clearly still has to grow among designers. We found it typical that during a recent debate organized by BVR, none of the more than fifty designers present claimed to live in a ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhood. ‘Oblique’ and ‘brown’ were the often heard associations; With the musty smell of boiled sprouts. Designers and opinion formers do not live in these places. As for the differences regenerating neighborhoods from the ‘70s and ‘80s is structurally different from regenerating those from the ‘50s and ‘60s in a number of ways. The ‘50s and ‘60s neighborhoods do have a clear urban structure and the task generally lays in finding ways to transform the bad building blocks. The problem is their preconfigured setup which does not relate to the scale of the city: they are autonomous, mono-functional entities based on relationships within the neighborhood. For this reason, they lack the physical connection between the neighborhood and the city and are comprised of many dispersed strips that need to be connected, to say nothing about their social and economic connections with the city. In neighborhoods from the ‘70s and ‘80s the assignment is actually reversed, so the tools developed in the approach of the ‘50s and ’60s neighborhoods can’t be applied directly. The ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhoods tend to be better connected with the city and have a richer diversity of dwelling typologies. The quality, 56

constructional aspects and living aspects, of the dwellings themselves are quite good. They are one-family dwellings with a garden, a popular type of course. There are often separate bicycle routes, free bus lanes, space for collectivity and district facilities. And, important, it is also possible to become homeowner. The concept of ‘woonerven’ (pedestrian priority areas) is actually an internationally successful concept. On the other hand, the threats found in these neighborhoods are mostly concerned with (an excess of) public space: the lack of maintenance, too much pavement and unused green, unsafe routes and subways, backstreets with storages on the street, parking problems, bad orientation, unclear transitions between public and private areas. But also social problems like a decrease in income, aging, and a lack of social control. On the urban level the neighborhoods have an unclear identity and an intermediate scale is missing, between the lowest scale of the ‘woonerven’ and the highest city scale.’

Designers tend to have a proactive attitude. At times when it is more difficult to develop new big projects, what can they undertake to get this new, different and ‘uncool’ assignment of regenerating the ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhoods, more on the map? ‘Recently we are seeing an enormous change in the field and this is clearly reflected in the type of projects. There is less budgeting, a much shorter time span for the process and the project is cut up into many different steps to minimize project risks. Big developments like Almere Duin (p.58) are rare. Nowadays the assignments are fewer. Especially financial feasibility has become more prominent than before, with specific attention being given to the maintenance, management and life cycle of a project. Strategic projects are no longer configured in such a way that a preconfigured set of requirements is given

which will then be handed to a design office and elaborated upon. Rather, it is the designer himself who needs to look for promising combinations of partnerships and to define or propose the program. This organizational aspect is becoming increasingly important in our field with the urbanist taking on the role of some kind of relationship broker. What is particularly important in this establishing of new original connections is the speed with which one accomplishes a successful combination. This will be a distinguishing skill of a successful designer. Today there is a depressing atmosphere that reigns in times of crisis. Everybody is blaming everyone else for the bad situation we are in, whereas it is a part of our profession to cope with such setbacks and be creative in finding solutions.’

The 7UP project is an example of this. It is a project conceived in collaboration with Ruimtelab2, bureau Krill, Paul de Graaf and the Urbanism department at TU Delft. So different areas of expertise are brought together. Did this lead to a different approach than the other ‘post-war’ redevelopment approaches? Liliane Geerling: ‘Our research has shown that there can be no general solution to the transformation assignment of the neighborhoods from the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, we think that we did come up with an interesting and tangible approach to the whole concept of sustainability. This new approach is necessary, since the field of urbanism lacks a good toolbox for the sustainable transformation of the existing housing stock. What sustainable development is, is not specifically defined in urbanism. Different projects are called ‘sustainable urbanism’. But approaches often take one-angle views. It is mostly either an unilaterally numerically technical approach or merely a peopleorientated approach. In a research-by-design case study carried out in Zevenkamp, a big ‘70s and ‘80s neighborhood in Rotterdam, we integrally put three different approaches in practice.

"Hardcore modernism is cool. But we are seeing a shift in this Calvinistic profession." The first approach considers the neighborhood as one environmental technical system (flows-perspective). The emphasis lies with energy, water, materials (including food and waste) and traffic. In sustainable development cycles are locally closed. This approach is common in urbanism. A good example is REAP, the Rotterdam Energy Approach and Planning. But for inhabitants, and

mobility underground parking garages

school yard is community square

demolishing of some dwellings in order to create space

dwelling: all outside space is public, each house gets a verandah

green structure forest gardening

biodiversity / dwellandscape trees and shrubs

utilization of roofs solar panels

block scale decentralized sustainable waterstructure rain water lead to canals in the sanitation north.

Figure 3. Each dwellandscape is subject to all priority goals

even for designers, this approach is rather abstract. Furthermore, this techno centric approach requires strong authority. The second approach is an anthropocentric approach (‘eye-level’ perspective). It is the well-being of human beings that has priority, think of a healthy and safe environment. This approach doesn’t look further than the short-term and loses track of large scale urgency. The third approach (which is not commonly used in the Netherlands) views the neighborhood as one ecosystem. Ecology researches the spreading of dominant species. In a neighborhood, the dominant species is comprised of humans with all their artifacts like buildings, roads etc. These artifacts and natural soil take care of gradients, for a greater diversity of conditions and for a living environment for other species. Ecology as an approach, as a set of relationships in a clearly deﬁned context, gives clues on how to cope with designing for an uncertain future. But it might be too static. However, when combining these approaches and seeing perspectives of different stakeholders in cohesion, this gives guidelines for making existing housing stock sustainable. In our research, each approach is worked out by a different team. Of course only taking one approach is quite paradoxical. Looking at a neighborhood from an ‘eyelevel’ perspective is promising, but in the design process the ‘ecosystem’ and the ‘ﬂows-perspective’ needs to be integrated. From the integration of three approaches a set of priority goals is composed, which can function as an inspiration for making an existing neighborhood more sustainable.’ (JB & JN) Atelier 7Up / BVR adviseurs / Krill / Leerstoel Environmental design Urbanism TU Delft (Machiel van Dorst) / Paul de Graaf Architecture and Research/Ruimtelab2 /March 2010/ Pictures from Krill, architecture, urban planning, research ©

Figure 2. Magnolia Valley

Figure 3. Birds eye view

Figure 1. Masterplan Almere DUIN

Figure 4. Overlooking the lake

Plan DUIN Beachcity of the Randstad is the ambition the municipality of Almere has in mind for the development of the coastal zone of the IJmeer. The municipality has issued a decided competition for three big Dutch developers. The winning plan is by Amvest and is called DUIN. The project is currently being developed. Also, Europan 11 has started and this plan DUIN is one of the sites this year. Participitation of Europan is a so called Design and Build assignment. Do you want to design the ﬁrst building in this new area? Register for plan DUIN on www.europan.nl.

BVR in cooperation with Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS), Christensen & Co (CCO), Stroming, LAgroup Leisure & Arts, DHV, Royal Haskoning, Jones Lang LaSalle, Q-Park, De VRBLDNG; Koeweiden Postma. Images by ZUS and CCO ©

Figure 5. Boulevard

Epilogue - Henco Bekkering In the last section of this issue of Atlantis, we hope to reflect on the themes and the content. It is meant to summarize and conclude, but also, taking in account the further content of the magazine, to give a final different view on the matters at hand. In an informal interview with Henco Bekkering, professor of Urban Design at Delft University of Technology since 1995, we discussed the magazine, and especially three story lines which are somewhat dominant throughout this issue on urban society; regeneration, politics and shifting roles, and the role of students, practitioners and education. We hope this epilogue will give a solid backdrop for further discussions on the themes and stories laid out in this issue.

Henco Bekkering has been a full professor of Urban Design at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft since 1995. He concentrates on urban projects, the relationship between urban design and architecture and the layout of urban spaces, attaching great importance to the historical stratiﬁcation of the location. Aspects such as the integration into existing and the signiﬁcance of public spaces play an important

On regeneration 'It is essential that our current task (as practitioners) consists for the most part of regeneration. We no longer have money to replace what we have, and there is no need to replace it. In the Netherlands, almost all the things that needed to be replaced, because they were of bad quality, are no longer there. As far as reuse goes, there is an endless amount of different things to say about that. Luuk Boelens says very interesting things about this in his interview. I think the question of meaning, or significance is the most underexposed in our discipline, and it is a very difficult one. What is the meaning of a monastery that will be reused for something else? What direction would you choose, using the meaning that has become fixed in stone in the building, literally? My point is that in my approach and belief, people value their environment based on giving meaning to it. This is something the users and the public do, rather than something the designer does on his own. He provides the conditions, but cannot decide the result. The building is built, and suddenly it is called De Hoge Heren. Not because Wiel Arets thought of it, he was very much against it, but because the developer thought of it.

role in the work of the Chair. In addition, Bekkering has also been a partner at HKB stedenbouwkundigen for more than twenty years. He is a member of the board of the Stichting Beheer Architectenregister foundation, as a representative of higher and academic education, and of the Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Loohuizen foundation. At the faculty he is vice-chairman of the Urbanism department and is in charge of the research programme. During a sabbatical year in 2009, he spent one semester as Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, and one as Guest Professor at the Tsinghua University in Beijing.

It’s about the tension between the history and the meaning absorbed by such an object, given to it by the public on one hand, and in the extent to which you can continue or transform that on the other. The world is changing and people are changing, and so are societies, and because of that the meanings also change. The theory for dealing with this is lacking in our discipline. I think Luuk Boelens touches on it, says it is truly important. Paul Stouten does not get near it I think, but that’s because he is a planner, and Boelens is closer to being a designer, although most of what he does is planning-like. I think it is essential to deal with the existing in such a way that meanings can transform, but that at the same time they have an intimate connection to the past. That is the core of it once you start regenerating; it is almost the description of the word. The difﬁculty with this is that the meaning is culturally determined, and the culture is constantly changing. So how to get a grip on this, and how to embed it in the education system, is a very difﬁcult question.'

On education 'It means students should be enticed to read books, visit museums and concerts, to explore what is happening outside of their known world. But that cannot be organised, you can only offer them the right environment. This attitude is 60

Figure 1. Alphen Centre from the west. HKB Stedenbouwkundigen Groningen Rotterdam

something which is not very much developed among students, which is logical, because it takes time and life experience to see the importance of it.' 'I do think it is increasing. There are remarkable waves in student populations and they are very short, five years. When we started giving attention to sustainability, we were not very far ahead, and we really had to explain the ideas to students. Nowadays that is not needed anymore; it has become a commonly accepted attitude. An even simpler example is computer use, and the ease with which you can access the internet. In the beginning teachers had to push that development, now it’s the other way around.' 'Studying is, I think by definition autodidactic. So I have a lot of difficulty with students that ask for the relation between one thing and the other. Finding relations and links is what studying is about, you develop a view and an opinion, based on the filters that you develop by looking at society and the changes that occur. That’s studying architecture and urbanism, and that shouldn’t be prescribed by us teachers, I am very much against that.'

On politics & shifting roles Speaking about regeneration, the roles are also changing. The government is taking on a different role, and so are market parties and even the residents. 'Most of these developments are not very cheerful at the moment. Spatial planning almost doesn’t exist anymore; planning and planning of infrastructure still exist, so there is some sort of compensation. We all know how determining infrastructure is for spatial planning, so the fact that it has always been looked at separately in the Netherlands is unwise. Now it has been joined together, and as the unintended result spatial planning has disappeared. The government however, says that this is not true, because the task has been put at the provincial level. But at the same time it is allocating less money to the provinces, which therefore don’t have the necessary people for this new task, which it is, at least in scale. So as a result spatial planning is becoming a big problem. Ofﬁcially spatial planning is incorporated into the new ministry, and there are those who are more positive and enthusiastic about it, of which Wouter Vanstiphout is one I think, and to a certain extent maybe even Luuk Boelens. The government side is a big problem, even worse is that at the same time the market side is an even bigger problem. Two recent reports, one from our own professor Friso de Zeeuw at Real Estate & Housing, indicate that project development as it once was will never be like that again. The key for this is the investments in land, done by the municipalities. This adds up to 12 billion of munici-

pal money, of which 3 billion will have to be amortized. That’s actually not that bad, a quarter, it can be overseen. I don’t know how much developers have invested in land, of course they keep that to themselves, but I think it’s a multiple of that of the municipalities, and in fact it is financed by the banks. When they amortize this it creates a sort of enlarged mortgage bubble, already blown over from the United States, which ends up in this whole sector of project developers.They have the same problem with all the office buildings they own, of which many millions of square meters are empty. If you take the regeneration of these buildings seriously, it means the artificial high booking value they now have, again largely financed by the banks, will have to go down drastically. The sector can’t afford that, so again it’s a bubble. It’s really just inflated air. Those two things combined will indeed lead to the end of project development as we have known it. That doesn’t mean we will stop doing things. With good sense we will do it with more modesty, basing the reasoning less on growth and more on consolidation and conservation: so regeneration.' In a lot of cases it is considered that standing still is the same as going backwards. 'That is; A, a cliché; B, it’s not true; and C, we don’t have a choice. If you look at the longer term, at the prizes of food and of raw materials, then our way of living is just not feasible, especially when you have to multiply it by three because China and India also want to join us at the same level. That’s just not possible. You can calculate that with more simple calculations than the Club of Rome set up. The next generation will have to cope with that fiercely, all the more reason to be careful with the current built environment. There is however another reasoning, one that is much more open and positive. If you note that more and more spatial order is getting the character of networks, rather than being centrally organised, and that networks simply consist of links and nodes, then the links only makes sense if the nodes are all different. The annoying thing is that all these nodes tend to become the same, and the only things that make them different is the way in which they now exist, their present characteristics and identities. Through new programmes they become more and more the same, because the form of finance is the same, because the norms and standards are the same, and because the demands and expectations that are stated are all the same. The difference can only come from that which already exists, which is why you should deal so carefully with the meaning the existing. For me that’s the heart of the story within our discipline. Outside of our discipline, there are far more 61

pragmatic arguments that play a large role, which we can also not ignore. I think it is about these two things; there is no other way, and it’s the best way. In Delft the understanding of this is beginning to shift. When I held my inaugural address in 1995 it was hushed, and since 2005 I give two or three lectures on the topic every year. That’s because in 1995 the line of thought was that preservation is a conservative action, and literally it is. But it is a complete misunderstanding to think that preserving quality is equal to political conservatism. That is something completely different, so the deﬁnitions of those words have become unclear, and not only in our discipline. The clear distinction between politically conservative and progressive has fully diverged; right and left have become meaningless categories. Well, the PVV is right wing, but you can be much more to the right than the PVV and their program includes traditionally left wing elements, and some of the originally rightist elements are now spread among all political parties. Again this is an argument for students -and practitioners- of urbanism to

different research has to be done, social economic and social political research, to find better ways to offer the possibility to free speech, for instance by improving municipal websites and having an enquiry on it every week that actually reaches people.” You cannot find out everything through polls and enquiries, so there should be other ways to deal with this. “What I think you should link to this is spatial and historical research in which you try to capture what the local qualities and characteristics are. The start of this has been made, not always quite right, with the welstandnota’s (local reports on urban and architectural form) which were made by the municipalities. Some have a bit of a lame outcome, the end result is much more simple than it should have been, for instance what the proportions of the windows should be, or that the colour of the roof should be orange. The thing that is generally very useful in these reports, which was quite carefully done, is the search for the differences between areas in a structural sense, to find the distinctions between what was generally called homo-

"It’s becoming more important to understand the local meaning and qualities of an area, and to derive the planning from that." keep track of what is happening in the outside world. In the elections, for the second time in a row people who traditionally voted CDA did not vote CDA, and probably never will again. That is an incredible shift on the level of Dutch society, where one of the powers or forces in this society, in a very short period of time, lost most of its power. To understand the sensitivity of that means you have to read the newspaper, and not just any.' Powers have also shifted on a global level; a new world, new urgencies, new order, new powers. 'The United States have had to get used to that the most, they always thought they were dealing the cards, but that is no longer the case. That doesn’t mean we will feel less impact when it hits us. So the reversal that is necessary, although it’s a bigger issue in the United States than here, will impact us all.' On a lower level municipalities also have to deal with these changes. 'What municipalities should focus on is that with diminishing resources, these have to be redistributed. You shouldn’t do that in a closed council meeting, but by trying to ﬁnd out what the most important elements are for the local society. This means more and 62

geneous areas. You should take these things into account when doing a project, to reﬁne them, and to see which points are applicable in the project you work on. The project you will be working on is no longer something that is decided only from above. That immediately brings in the dilemma on what urbanism is all about, which is the relation between the different scales. In my opinion, that asks for a relatively strong government. One that understands what it’s about and also has the attitude to take into account what’s being said from the other side, so-called bottom up. In the best cases this is happening now, even with big projects.' It’s becoming more important to understand the local meaning and qualities of an area, and to derive the planning from that. 'There is no reason to be afraid for changes or transformations, but you have to understand what changes you are proposing. In order to understand how something works, you have to understand the origins, and you have to study this in depth to understand the existing situation.' (JW)

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April 27th, 08:30 to 21:30 East-Serre, Faculty of Architecture TU Delft.

Lunch Lecture Serious Gaming April 27th, 12:30 to 13:30 Berlage Room, Faculty of Architecture TU Delft.

Upload Cinema: Remixing The City May 1st, from 14.30 de Dépendance, Schiekade 189, Rotterdam

Midterm BBQ party Activate your personal account! For our new website every student member has to create a login account. To activate your personal account all you need to do is fill in the registration form for Polis Students at our new website: www.polistudelft.nl (even if you are an existing member you will still need to enter the membership information again to create a login) After activation you'll be able to login and sign up for all upcoming Polis events online! Registration will only cost you two minutes and by this you can fully experience the new Polis website!

May 12th, 17:00 to 23:00 Van der Leeuwkring op locatie 2

How Do You Landscape - Memory & Idea Jelle Reumer & Bruno Doedens (SLeM) May 19th 16:00 to 18:00 01west550, Faculty of Architecture TU Delft

How Do You Landscape - Memory & Idea Salomon Kroonenberg & formalhaut® June 9th, 16:00 to 18:00 01west550, Faculty of Architecture TU Delft

Board of Advice Polis established a Board of Advice. This board consists of four experts, from within the faculty as well from the work field. The Board of Advice helps us to reflect on running activities and upcoming events. By this we bring more structure to our agenda and furthermore anchor our activities in both the academic world as the workfield. Polis Board of Advice members are: Ana Maria Fernandez-Maldonado – TU Delft, MaartenJan Hoekstra – TU Delft, Koen de Boo – Plein06 and Boris Hocks – Posad.

Polis Urbanism Week 2011 The fourth week of September 2011 you will experience Urbanism through the whole Faculty of Architecture. By organizing lectures, debates, workshops and social events we want to relink our studentmembers with the professionals. The theme of this year will be ‘So, you are an urbanist?!’ Do you have some great ideas and/or want to get involved in the Urbanism Week? Please contact us by: urbanismweek@polistudelft.nl

The Knight’s Move: Iain Borden June 9th, 20:00 to 22:00 Stroom, Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag

The Knight’s Move: Anthony Vidler June 20th, 20:00 to 22:00 Stroom, Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag

Visible Cities June 8th, 20.00 to 22:00 Verdieping, Wiboutstraat 127, Amsterdam

Urban summer party June 30th, 17:00 to 23:00

NAi opening July 1st Museumpark 25, Rotterdam